Tag Archives: credit crunch

Madame Zingara on deathbed

After a short illness, Madame Zingara and her sister Mojolena are on their deathbed.

Not only is Madame Zingara in provisional liquidation , but her UK partners, who had provided financial backing and helped with staff work visa applications, have both withdrawn, citing the global credit crunch.   The show had moved to Battersea Power Station in London in December, and was planning a tour to Scotland and Europe thereafter, reports the Cape Times.

Richard Griffin, a talented and creative dinner theatre showmaster, has had his share of bad luck.  The first Madame Zingara restaurant, which opened in Loop Street eight years ago, was destroyed by a fire, which challenged Griffin to buy a Spiegelpaleis circus tent in Belgium and set up his Theatre of Dreams underneath the highway at the entrance to the port in Cape Town. 

Perhaps more of a showman than a businessman, Griffin did not see the global credit crunch coming, and the impact it would have on opening a new restaurant in London, whilst opening a new sister restaurant, Mojolena, at the same time in Cape Town in December.  WhaleTales was critical of the opening party for Mojolena.

What credit crunch?

Bookings ahead for the accommodation industry look very promising, as the world appears to have gotten used to the credit crunch, and is rewarding itself with holidays as a result of what it has endured this year.

February is always a heavily booked month, and Whale Cottage Camps Bay is already 75 % booked ahead, a very different picture to that experienced for November, when only half the accommodation was booked prior to the start of the month and the rest was booked last minute during the month. 

It would appear that the remainder of the summer season will be a booming one.   Bookings from the UK market are as strong as in seasons before, and the 2 % cut in the UK VAT rate, and interest rate cuts, coupled with the favourable exchange rate, are stimulating confidence, and therefore tourism bookings.   The UK and Europe are also experiencing a very cold and early winter.

The petrol price decrease, and the anticipated cut in the interest rate this week, is encouraging South Africans to travel locally this festive season.  With the cost of a tank of petrol under R 400, bookings for the Garden Route and country towns and villages outside of Cape Town have seen a strong and very welcome increase.

Cape Town top UK holiday destination

More than 25 000 readers of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph have voted Cape Town as their favourite top travel destination in the Telegraph Travel Awards 2008, ahead of Sydney, San Francisco and Vancouver.  The article has only one photograph, that of Table Mountain taken from Blouberg. 

Favourite travel countries outside of Europe were voted as New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada.    The survey ascribes the choice of favourite cities to favourable exchange rates.

The poll also showed that more than half the readers spent about R 15 000 on their last holiday, and with the credit crunch they are even more in need of a break, but seek value for money like never before.    This makes travelers return to destinations they have been to before, being “English-speaking former colonies – and companies they feel they can entrust with their hard-earned pounds”. 

About three quarters of the readers say they book their holidays themselves, and not via a tour operator, due to the better value for money they receive.   About 90 % use the internet to plan their holidays. 

More than 90 % of the readers said that they would not change their choice of travel destination nor would they downgrade their accommodation as a result of the credit crunch.    This is excellent news for Cape Town and the Western Cape, given that the UK is the largest source of international tourism to the region.

Marketing key in tourism downturn

Destination marketing takes on an even more important role in times of a global financial crisis, so that a country can achieve awareness amongst its target market when the global economy recovers.

This is the message S A Tourism CEO Moeketsi Mosola brought to the tourism industry this week, after the August arrival statistics were released. and reflected a slowdown in the arrivals growth rate, to 6 %.   Tourism growth has been double-digit in the past.

Mosola warned the industry of difficult times ahead, and said that the industry should not lose heart, even though he acknowledged that the arrivals information indicated that the credit crunch was affecting tourism for the first time.   “The industry at large was reporting its worst results since the outbreak of SARS in 2003” says the S A Tourism media release, but is in line with global tourism market conditions.

In line with its destination market strategy to aggressively market the country in general, and especially for the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, S A Tourism will be launching advertising campaigns on CNN, BBC, Eurosport and in cinemas in 2009.   It already has a regular presence on SkyNews, showing a hot air balloon over a beautiful landscape.

Mosola encourages the industry to use the downturn to invite the media and tour operators to experience their products and services, and the country’s “variety and depth of travel experiences South Africa offers leisure travellers”, to be ready for the upturn.    He also encourages the industry to focus on domestic marketing.

Just a week prior, S A Tourism’s Didi Moyle had said that her organisation was “monitoring the economic turmoil ‘closely’, but that there had been no decline in tourism arrivals to South Africa”, reports the Cape Argus.   She had said that the credit crunch could be positive for South Africa, due to the undervalued Rand, but that fewer tourists would visit South Africa as they would rather travel in their own countries.

Arrivals in August showed good growth from France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, India, USA, Canada, and Australia, whilst it was flat for the UK and Germany, two of the three most important overseas source markets making up just less than half a million visitors.    Arrivals from China, Japan, and Italy also were relatively flat.   Only Japan showed a decline in arrivals, by 3 %.