Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines
* The ANC has taken the City of Cape Town to the Cape Town High Court, about the change in its logo last year without obtaining public input. The logo was widely criticized when it was launched. The political party estimates the cost of rolling out the new logo at R8 million.
* Nederburg Auction 2015 keynote speaker Robert Joseph will share Continue reading →
The Sweet Service Award goes to the Hermanus Tourism Bureau, for almost daily calls since the Whale Festival, for accommodation enquiries for tourists visiting the town. This is something we have not seen for a good two years, and reflects on the greater fairness in spreading tourist bookings across the broad spectrum of accommodation establishments, and not favouring a select few, as was the case during the regime of the previous Board of the Bureau. The enquiries are turning into bookings, and are most welcome. The Bureau also assisted in passing on CVs it had received for a position it had advertised, leading to a successful appointment.
The Sour Service Award goes to the South African gas industry, which is in short supply, leaving half of the estimated 2500 restaurants in the country powerless to prepare food for their clients this week, says the Restaurant Association of South Africa, and reported in Mail & Guardian. In the past few years most commercial enterprises switched to gas, to not be vulnerable to ESKOM electricity outages experienced in the past. The SA Petroleum Industry body has not been able to indicate when production of LPG will return to normal, after ‘unplanned shutdowns in the local oil refinery industry’.
The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog. Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at info@whalecottage.com. Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.
Three directors of Cape Town Tourism and heads of important Cape Town business tourism businesses have joined forces to make a plea for how “cool” Cape Town is in the winter months, a period typically plagued by seasonality, with far reduced accommodation bookings, which has an impact on all sectors of the tourism industry.
In an article in the Cape Times last week, Guy Lundy of Accelerate, Ian Bartes of Cape Town International airport, and Rashid Toefy of the Cape Town International Convention Centre wrote that of all South African cities, Cape Town is unique in its seasonality, which “makes it hard for the hospitality industry to be sustainable”. They add: “With 18 five-star hotels now operating in the city, we must find ways to increase visitor numbers during winter.” The tourism leaders says it is not a surprise that Cape Town sees so many restaurants opening and then closing, in that they build restaurants to meet capacity support in summer, but cannot see this through in the winter months when business falls away. They also state that the number of passenger arrivals in April and May is half of that in December and January.
They blame this on the positioning and marketing of Cape Town as mainly a leisure destination, which “always seem to feature the Waterfront, Clifton and the Winelands on their covers”, with not enough promotion of the city as an investment and business destination. Conference facilities, factories and office blocks do not feature in the city’s marketing collateral. They call for more direct international flights to Cape Town, and more flights between the city and other African cities, to make Cape Town a world business destination, and a global African city, given that it already has a world class airport, good hotels, excellent infrastructure, ‘some of the finest restaurants’, natural beauty, entertainment, world-class technology, sophisticated business networks, and a favourable time zone for doing business with the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 
To make Cape Town a global business destination, it needs to be considered for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (the M.I.C.E. market). The Convention Centre is ranked 34th in the world in size of business, and it plans to double its capacity to reach its goal of making the top ten list. Winter is an ideal time for conferences, the writers say, in that most activities take place indoors. Whilst conference delegates spend less time in a city on average, their average spend is higher than that of a leisure tourist. The writers also state that the businesses of the Western Cape, e.g. food and wine, oil and gas, boat-building and ship repair, design, film, technology, renewable energy, asset management, business process outsourcing and medical research should expose their businesses to overseas markets via exhibitions and conferences, to attract business travellers to Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape, including Winelands, West Coast and Overberg towns.
The World Cup demonstrated what a good winter weather city Cape Town can be, with rain on only three of the match days, and snowfalls on the mountains for a short while during the soccer tournament month. The soccer fans were not put off by the rain and cold, and their ‘gees’ was not dampened in any way. This leads to a renewed call for the ‘green season’ to be marketed in the winter months. The cooler Cape weather is attractive to visitors from the Middle East, and the Asian countries, who have to endure hot and humid weather at that time. The writers also suggest a winter sale, which reduces accommodation, restaurants, and clothing, as is done in Paris, Singapore and New York. The writers seem unaware that the small accommodation industry has been leading the tourism sector for years, in reducing its rates by as much as half in winter. This year the restaurants in Cape Town and the Winelands also came to the party, and offered good winter specials, some even extending these into current summer specials.
We support the writers’ call for more events to be hosted to attract visitors, but it is sad to read that the City of Cape Town does not have enough funding to support big events (there is activity by Cape Town Routes Unlimited in marketing a small number of approved events, all hosted in summer months).
If Cape Town had no seasonality, airlines would fly into the city all year round, and would bring travellers, making tourism business more viable and reducing unemployment. It is for this reason that the business tourism leaders ask that the tourism industry get on board the Cape of Good Business!
It is interesting that the three writers are Board members of Cape Town Tourism, which focuses almost exclusively on leisure tourism, while the business tourism business that they are pleading for is in the domain of Cape Town Routes Unlimited, on which Board only ACSA is represented, and on which the three tourism leaders may have been able to make a greater contribution than at Cape Town Tourism.
Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage
I visited Khayelitsha for the first time in about 15 years yesterday, to attend the opening and launch of the Indlovu Project, a community development project aimed at addressing the high unemployment, large numbers of teenage pregnancies, lack of sanitation, and prevalence of TB and HIV, in Monwabisi Park in the township. The invitation came for SAfm presenter Nancy Richards, and I am delighted to have made the time to attend the opening of this fantastic project.
I had not heard of the project prior to the invitation, so went to the ceremony with an open mind. I had no fear of driving through Khayelitsha, and felt that little had changed. When I first moved to Cape Town twenty years ago I ran a Market Research and PR company called Relationship Marketing, and we were the first company to take clients into the townships, to show them the fantastic entrepreneurial spirit of the township residents, and the diversity of retailing in these suburbs. I drove past Coca Cola branded spaza shops (miniature supermarkets), shebeens, braaiers of meat for “take aways”, sellers of sanitaryware, beds and building materials, all displayed along Mew Way, the main road through Khayelitsha. I wondered where these items are stored in case of rain and flooding.
The Indlovu Project is a collective Youth Centre, guest house, daycare centre, clinic, soup kitchen, and creche, which was established in 2008. Earlier this year the entire project burnt down in a shack fire. Bishop’s School came to the assistance immediately, helping to clear the site, and monies were raised to rebuild all the facilities, but on a larger scale and following eco-friendly principles, given the donations received from actor Sir Ian McLellan (who is currently in Cape Town, acting in Samuel Becket’s ‘Waiting for Godot’), The Rotary Club of Claremont, actor Ralph Brown (who is busy filming “Dark Tide” with Halle Berry and brought her to the Project a week ago), the 476 Trust, Enzyme, and Investec Bank. It is planned to market the Indlovu Project as a Tourism Centre, by offering traditional African meals in the community hall, so that the work of the project may be seen and supported.
But what impressed me the most was the work by and dedication of the Bishop’s Grade 10 boys, who worked in two teams of two on a World Bank project called Evoke – over a ten-week period the boys researched the needs at Indlovu, found solutions, and wrote a blog about their work. Of the 19 000 scholars that signed up around the world for the World Bank’s Global Giving on-line project, the four Bishop’s scholars came first, and were given $1000 in seed money to grow their projects. The Ecovillage project of Reid Falconer and Martin Dyer investigated self-sustainability in terms of fruit and vegetable supply, and analysed the soil type in the township, to choose the most suitable type of vegetables and fruit to grow. The other Bishop’s pair, Emile Nauta and Kishan Chagan, tackled the township problem of shack fires, and developed a fire-resistant paint that costs less than one-tenth of the commercial cost of such paint, by simply adding two ingredients obtainable at pharmacies to the paint. The boys will be flown to Washington to receive their prize, and are pushing themselves to raise funds to continue their work – one goal being to raise money to paint 1000 shacks by 2012. The project was demonstrated, by lighting a newspaper painted with their paint, but it did not burn. What impressed me was that the Bishops children come from well-to-do backgrounds, but it was very obvious that they are very proud participants in this project.
The Makaze guest house is colourful and homely. There is no TV, but the kitchen is spacious. The Bishops’ moms assisted with the interior decor, Lucia Brain being the decorator. I loved the Lion Match papered wardrobe door, and the recycled items dotted around the guest house, as well as the lamp shades made from buckets in the lounge. Two bedrooms have bunk beds in them, while the third is the “Presidential Suite”, with a king bed. Dinner is served to guests, being traditional African food. The monies made from the guest house operation is used to fund the community soup kitchen. What makes the guest house fascinating is that it is “green”, in that it was built by the community from sandbags and eco-beams; it is powered by solar energy and gas; and it has earthworm sanitation.
I felt enriched in having spent two hours in Khayelitsha, in experiencing a project opening which was blessed by a sangoma, entertained by proud township dancers and musicians, performing traditional music, that I could see a part of Cape Town that we do not acknowledge being on our doorstep, and experiencing the friendliness of the locals towards us as visitors, with so much goodwill to each other. I will contribute to the Bishops’ Ecovillage and Fire Retard projects. I encourage you to do so too.
Indlovu Project, off Mew Way, Monwabisi Park, Khayelitsha. Tel (021) 657-1026. http://www.shaster.org.za/index.php/projects/6-indlovu-project/6-indlovu-project.html
Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com