The verbose report-back by Cape Town Tourism CEO Mariette du Toit-Helmbold about her organisation’s attendance at the world’s largest travel and tourism expo and convention ITB (10000 exhibitors from 188 countries) in Berlin ten days ago contains the shock admission that tourists are ‘staying away in their (sic) droves’ from South Africa, Egypt, and Greece, due to violence and political unrest in general, and due to ‘a burst of negative international publicity around violence and labour unrest’ in South Africa specifically!

One wonders what statistics Mrs Helmbold has used to draw this conclusion, and how serious this drop in tourism is, given that no tourism statistics for 2013 are available yet.  The events Mrs Helmbold blames for the drop in tourism numbers only took place in the last four months, and it would be hard for her to offer statistical evidence of her statement, in our opinion.

We have written before that Mrs Helmbold is a poor writer, and in her blogpost on the Cape Town Tourism website she wrote ‘it is important to understand and counter-address economic, political and social stability (sic) and its effect on inbound tourism‘.  Given the highly inflammatory statistically-unsubstantiated statement about the effects on tourism of recent undesirable events in the country by Mrs Helmbold, and her call to create instability if one tries to understand what she was trying to say, it is clear that Mrs Helmbold should be silenced until she leaves Cape Town Tourism in July, before she causes any further damage for brand Cape Town!   Even worse is that Cape Town Tourism has a PR and Communications department as well as a PR agency, which did not appear to edit Mrs Helmbold’s blogpost about ITB and tourism trends before posting it, it containing additional grammatical errors.

If the message of huge tourism stay-aways was one of the major ‘gems’ Mrs Helmbold brought back from Berlin, one would expect her to have made quick work to pull in Wesgro, and the City of Cape Town, as well as the Western Cape Tourism department to address this dreadful state of affairs.  No word has been heard publicly (other than the blogpost) from her since her return from Berlin, and neither does she offer any solutions to counter this image problem for tourism to our country and especially to Cape Town, despite having dedicated one quarter of her blogpost to this image theme.

Amongst all the waffle, the following few trends (the actual essence of the blogpost, according to its headline!) were found:

*   tourists now want ‘a simple, sustainable, and self-sufficient life’

*   tourists want meaningful community interaction and involvement

*   last minute impulse bookings are increasing, requiring greater flexibility, changed cancellation policies. and greater use of digital marketing

*   In 2012 beach holidays were most frequently booked by European tourists, although growth for this type of tourism was static relative to the year before.  Cape Town Tourism purposely moved away from a positioning for Cape Town of natural beauty of its beaches and mountains 18 months ago.

*   despite contradictory growth statistics presented for Germany, Germans took 329 million domestic and international trips in 2012, with a growth in 3%, ‘and now accounts for 45% of the entire travel market’, but Mrs Helmbold does not explain what this statistic means!

*   traditional source markets are predominantly aged 49 – 65 years, and our local tourism products should be geared for this age group.  However, emerging market tourists are far younger, and these could be from China, Russia, and Brazil.

The concluding paragraph of the blogpost is pure Helmbold, completely non-understandable, and not preceded by anything that could explain what she is trying to say: ‘Nostalgia is the worst business model. never waste the opportunity that comes with a crisis’!

It is clear that the Cape Town Tourism Board as well as its funders, the City of Cape Town, are not reading Mrs Helmbold’s ramblings, in that they are not addressing the damage she causes with her badly worded nonsensical writing on behalf of our beautiful city!

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