City of Cape Town Councillor for Tourism, Events, and Marketing, Grant Pascoe, has a lot of image polishing to do after he and his Tourism, Events, and Marketing Directorate were in the dog box, having to undergo an embarrassing forensic audit recently.  It is annoying to read his misleading optimistic view of the Festive Season, clearly without substantiation.  The same applies to a media release from Cape Town Tourism, making projections based on poor market research techniques.

The Councillor brags in an article in the City of Cape Town’s weekly newsletter, just two days after the Cape Town Tourism media release was dispatched,  that Cape Town ‘is gearing up for a bumper festive season‘, undefined and unsubstantiated, adding that the City plans to position itself as the ‘Events Capital of Africa’, a surprise given that no events have been created since the Councillor established his Directorate headed by Anton Groenewald.  In fact the Directorate, with an annual budget of R500 million, has not shown any sign of tourism marketing action, other than laying on some small scale soccer matches at the Cape Town Stadium, a sport which Pascoe personally is particularly fond of!  Groenewald ironically was quoted recently in saying that Cape Town has lost out on a number of events due to not having a substantial event bid budget!

Nothing that the Directorate has done for Cape Town has been visible nor has benefited tourism in Cape Town, shocking given that they took away the role of Destination Marketing from Cape Town Tourism last year, and a few million Rands, supposedly to spend them on ‘Place Marketing‘! The Directorate does fund the Cape Town Design NPC, the company which is managing Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014, on which Board Groenewald sits and appears to direct the action!

Pascoe wants tourists as well as locals to catch the Festive Season ‘gees’, to unite the diverse Cape Town community.  Some of the event examples he mentions are ‘a free concert, festive lights switch-on, summer market, tweede nuwe jaar parade and a New Year’s Eve party, including the final countdown to Cape Town becoming the World Design Capital 2014.’  The events list for Cape Town, found elsewhere, includes:

*   1 December: switching on the Christmas lights on Adderley Street by Mayor Patricia de Lille

*   14 – 30 December: Cape Town Summer Market at the Company’s Garden, previously held on Adderley Street.

*   16 December: Day of Reconciliation party on the Fanwalk plus a celebration of the 25 day countdown to the start of the African Nations soccer Championships 2014.

*   20 – 24 December: Langa Summer Market

*   24 December:  Christmas bands and choirs in the city centre

*   1 January at 0h30:  ‘Nagtroupe‘ parade

*   4 January: Minstrel street march

*   11 January – 1 February: African Nations (soccer) Championship 2014, Cape Town being one of the three cities in which the championship will be held, with the opening and closing ceremonies granted to the Mother City, and the city will be the home base of the national team Bafana Bafana.

Other than possibly the soccer championship, none of the other events are likely to make any impact on Cape Town’s tourism industry!  Interesting is that both the City of Cape Town article and the City of Cape Town media release quote the same statistics as to the employment benefit of tourism, as well as the economic impact it has for the city.

Cape Town Tourism CEO Enver Duminy is bullish in the media release, stating that ‘we are optimistic about the tourism outlook for this summer season with positive growth in forward bookings being felt by many of our members‘.  He does warn about economic and political instability in the world, as well as financially stressed local consumers (who are at their lowest level of confidence in 20 years), warning his members to not be over-optimistic!  We have seen the past three months to be particularly poor, and find that bookings are extremely last minute, often on the same day, making it impossible to project occupancy ahead.  The media release quotes Deon Cloete, the GM of Cape Town International, who expresses that the festive season ‘…appears to be promising’!

The African Nations Championship start date of 11 January is outside of the tourism industry’s definition of the ‘Festive Season’, probably ending on 5 January.  No enquiries nor bookings have been received for the soccer championship period to date.  The Festive Season events listed above, with the exception of that held on 16 December, are not new, and will only attract Capetonians into the city centre, with little or no benefit to the tourism industry.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage