Henry Jonker | WhaleTales Blog by Chris von Ulmenstein

Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

* Southern African Tourism Update has announced that BA is introducing two A380 aircraft on its London – Johannesburg route from February (three times a week), and six times a week from March, with discounts of about 40%.

* Golf tourism will be an important part of the sports tourism strategy that is currently in development by the Department of Tourism, said its Deputy Minister Tokozile Xasa a recent seminar exploring the potential of the South African golf tourism market. South Africa has a great golf product offering, but lack of awareness and access are the major obstacles to growing the market. Interesting golf tourism statistics were shared at the seminar:

• ‘There are 54 million golfers worldwide

• 25% of these say they will go on a golf holiday in the next 12 months

• Golfers on average spend 120% more per day than the general average

• Golf tourism bounces back from economic shocks quicker than any other tourism market’ Continue reading →

The Sweet Service Award goes to Mohammed and to Wilma of the Sunday Times, for helping a customer to subscribe to the paper, after 6 months of frustration in trying to do so via the call centre. A chance connection to Mohammed in the Human Resources department of Avusa, the company owning the Sunday Times, helped the customer to find Wilma, the person responsible for subscriptions in Cape Town. Wilma can be contacted at tel 021 488 1823. The delivery of the Sunday Times has been perfect since contact was made with her.

The Sour Service Award goes to Rocketseed, a company which sells branded signatures to the tourism industry. The signature has to be designed by a separate company, and then Rocketseed sets it up with telephonic support. It soon became evident to the user that the design has a weakness in that the “footer” does not follow the e-mail content when an enquiry from a prospective guest is replied to. For more than a month the customer tried to get Rocketseed to fix this design error, but received the poorest service from the support staff at Rocketseed. It appeared that they did not know how to fix the problem, and kept the customer tied up on the phone for hours on end, in trying to load a revised version of the signature. When the customer requested that a more senior staff member assist with problem, Henry Jonker, a director of Rocketseed, called. He was extremely arrogant. His response was to threaten the cancellation of the customer’s annual subscription of the branding service, which had to be paid in full prior to the customer being able to test the signature application.

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.