Tag Archives: English

West Coast offers game viewing as well as San cultural heritage experience!

 

The West Coast is regarded by many Capetonians and locals as a road that links to a few coastal towns and mainly leads one to Namibia. In Spring it is well known as a flower bed.

However, it offers tourists two special places to visit, just one hour out of Cape Town, and before you reach Langebaan: the !Kwha Ttu San Culture and Heritage Centre as well as the Buffelsfontein Game Reserve. As a Tourist Guide I have taken German tourists to both destinations, and they have enjoyed our visits to both. Continue reading →

‘My Cape Town Guide/Mein Kapstadt Guide’ launched, after qualifying as a Tourist Guide during Lockdown!

 

In January I attended a Tourist Guiding course run by the Tourist Guiding Institute, with a theoretical as well as a practical content, and received my Certificate last week, the issuing thereof much delayed due to the Covid-19 Lockdown. I am qualified as a Cultural Tourist Guide, as well as a Wine Tourist Guide, for the Western Cape as well as Port Elizabeth and the Garden Route, and guide in English and in German. I have created a Facebook page, calling my Guiding Service ‘My Cape Town Guide/Mein Kapstadt Guide’. Continue reading →

Sweet Service Award goes to Blaque handbag shop; Sour Service Award goes to Uber Rio De Janeiro!

The Sweet Service Award goes to Blaque handbag shop in Alto Palermo in Buenos Aires, and the staff member who spoke good English when I shopped for handbags there, as well as another staff member who served me on a subsequent visit, exchanging one of the bags with a new one when the zip was not working properly. Continue reading →

WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 20 June

WhaleTalesTourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

*   The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is encouraging its members to use IT to improve the customer experience, saying that airlines ‘fly people and cargo, not planes‘. Consistency of customer experience is not yet satisfactory for airlines, with little differentiation. Customers would like to use IT to check in online, tag luggage themselves, board themselves, and collect bags themselves, an IATA survey found last year.  IATA’s goal is that 80% of passengers have a ‘self-service suite based on industry standards‘ available to them by 2020.

*   PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is not known as a Tourism consultancy, so its prediction about our country’s tourism future is a surprise.  Its report presents growth of 4% in international tourists 2013, far lower than the 10% growth in 2012.  Growth is said to be solid and good, but ‘not fantastic growth‘.  Almost three quarters of international visitors to our country are from Africa, the report confirms.  Nigeria would become the leading source market for our country, the PwC study predicts.  The Guest House category is the fastest growing in respect of room availability.  South Africa’s strength is that it attracts leisure as well as business travelers.

*   France must be feeling the tourism pinch, having announced plans to become more welcoming to tourists, English speaking ones in particular.   The country hopes to increase tourist numbers to 100 million, Continue reading →