hotel beds | WhaleTales Blog by Chris von Ulmenstein

If Social Media Marketing performance is anything to go by, the World Cup is an outstanding success.

Twitter has shown record usage since the start of the World Cup on 11 June, often crashing due to overload when a World Cup match is underway, fans of a particular team egging on their players to do better, or to praise them for a good performance. Twitter has a “fail-whale” sign when it is over-capacity.

If the Whale Cottage Portfolio WhaleTales blog is anything to go by, then the blogosphere has reached record heights. With steadily climbing unique readership of about 30 000 per month, the current unique readership for the first 21 days in June is already at 84025, meaning that the total for June could be close to 120 000, an unprecedented performance. The unique readership peaked on the opening day of the World Cup on 11 June, at a record 8182. Of the stories that have been written on our blog to date, the following posts have been the most widely read this month, proving that the World Cup dominates interest over any other topic, such as restaurant reviews:

1. Cape Town Restaurant Winter Blues specials

2. Table Mountain only SA new 7wonders nominee

3. World Cup 2010 FIFA flop

4. FIFA Ticket Collection Sweet and Good Food & Wine Show Sour Awards

5. Restaurant Reviewer receives harsh reviews about review

6. Cape Town parties through the World Cup

7. World Cup match attendance: staying on the FIFA ball

8. Cape Town blows the largest vuvuzela

9. Cape Town drowning in hotel beds

10. World Cup puts SA into focus, some bad, most good

Tags (blog-speak for keywords) too are of interest, and reflect the world’s focus on the World Cup, and the following were most used tags, connecting Google and other search engine users to the Whale Cottage Portfolio website:

1. USA Today

2. Minister of Tourism

3. World Cup 2010

4. Confederations Cup

5. Fan parks

6. Grant Thornton (the tourism consultancy that did forecasts of World Cup attendance)

7. Ivanka Trump (who spent her honeymoon in the Cape earlier this year)

8. Vuvuzela

9. 2010

10. Prince William (attended the England versus Algeria game)

Ten days ago the Whale Cottage Portfolio Whale Tales Blog was registered with www.amatomu.com for the first time, a Top SA Blogsites site measuring web traffic. The growth in traffic has moved the Whale Cottage Portfolio Blog to the top 20 list, being in 16th position of all blogs in South Africa today.

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

Cape Town has a surplus of hotel beds, mainly at the 5-star level, and it is expected that there will be a major shake-out in this sector after the completion of the World Cup, and “only the fittest will survive”, reports Travel News Now.

Ten new hotels have opened their doors in Cape Town since last year, and include the newest, the Strand Towers, The Pepper Club, Taj Hotel Cape Town (the international monies have been well-spent on this building) , 15 on Orange (which has had money thrown at it by Protea Hotel’s African Pride Hotels), Crystal Towers Hotel, Coral International Cape Town (the first ‘dry’ hotel in the city), One&Only Cape Town (Sol Kerzner is the owner), Cape Royale Luxury Hotel, Harbour Bridge Hotel and Suites, and the Upper East Side Hotel. Four further hotels are in the pipeline for the city.

If the new hotels were the only ones in town, other accommodation establishments would not feel the current accommodation demand decline and room oversupply so badly. But a recent statistic shows that Cape Town currently has 84 hotels with 11 584 rooms in total, compared to the national totals of 596 hotels and 65 872 rooms.

The oversupply of accommodation has led to price-cutting, as the hotels compete to attract declining numbers of visitors to the city. On average, it is said that most accommodation establishments in Cape Town are 50 % full for the World Cup.

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