The Sweet Service Award goes to Discovery, and its Vitality Rewards, for being particularly generous earlier this week, I receiving 2 Gameboard plays, with a Miles score exceeding 300, when I normally receive about 50 or 60 Miles per play, worth R5 or R6! On top of that, the number of Miles required per voucher was reduced by 20%, so only 800 miles were required to receive a 1000 Discovery Mile voucher worth R100. Continue reading →
Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines
* The inflation rate has dropped to 5,3%, leading economists to speculate that the interest rate will remain unchanged or may even drop when the Reserve Bank meets next week. Inflation is expected to decrease further when the petrol price drops by an estimated R1 per litre in February, to as low as 3,3% by April.
* SAA has received a guarantee of a further R6,5 billion from the government, to allow its auditors to publish its financial results.
* The One&Only Cape Town is offering a new Wedding Concierge service, including ‘one-of-a-kind wedding proposals‘. Wedding Continue reading →
I missed the Cape Town Tourism member presentation by Mary Tebje, Cape Town Tourism’s Trade and Press representative in London, in Cape Town in April, and was alerted to it by Commenters to our blogpost about Cape Town Tourism’s depressing forecast for the tourism industry for the next three years.
The reality is that the UK market, the largest source market for Cape Town, is severely depressed, and this is already making itself felt in extremely poor forward bookings from that country. The high unemployment, increased air passenger duty, fuel price increases, a VAT increase, and an unheard of inflation rate at 4,5 % have created ‘a pessimism not seen since the 1940’s’, Ms Tebje said. This has led to the ‘staycation’, with the British being forced to holiday at home.
The Cape Town Tourism summary of Ms Tebje’s talk is thin, but the bottom-line is that Ms Tebje recommended that tourist packages should be put together for the UK market, and should certainly include cultural experiences. Guests would want to book a number of activities in all-inclusive packages, so that they did not have to worry about extras to pay for whilst on holiday. This requires a collaborative approach between accommodation providers and tour guides. In a discussion at the meeting, the ‘township tour and gum-boot dancing routine’ were felt to not be a worthy representation of Cape Town’s culture. 
Miss Tebje profiled the typical UK traveller as being the ‘over 50s market’, a booming one, which has money, and is largely interested in cultural experiences. Day trips are popular, and should include food and wine. “Teach them to braai”, she recommended, as the UK visitors love to bring home their newly acquired culinary skills, and to talk about their cuisine experiences. In 2010, 450000 tourists visited Cape Town from the UK, and a quarter of these came to visit friends and family. Yet Ms Tebje painted a contradictory picture of the UK visitor, saying that they spend three hours per day in the sun, and an hour and a half in the bar, according to a survey undertaken by TripAdvisor! “In fact, we are so busy boozing and bathing that Brits often neglect cultural pursuits, rating the worst in Europe for museum visits and other cultural activities”, she said. Ms Tebje said that the UK tourists are looking for more adventure from their holidays these days, and therefore they are now travelling to Borneo and Bolivia.
Ms Tebje said that Cape Town was competing with destinations such as Orlando and Spain too, and that the Cape Town accommodation prices were not inexpensive. Added to this was the feedback that Ms Tebje had received from tour operators selling the Cape in the UK, feeding back to her the negative effect of the strong Rand, the high cost of flights to our country, shorter booking lead times, poor perception of value for money, and price sensitivity.
The Cape tourism industry will have to look for tourists from Germany and particularly South Africa, to survive the poor coming summer season. It won’t include too many visitors from the UK!
Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage
Tour operators say South African accommodation has become too expensive for their UK clients, and they have called on local accommodation suppliers to relook their prices for 2011, reports South African Tourism Update.
Portfolio of Places representative in the UK, James Westrip of Africa Collection, says that the “good-value-for-money perception” of South Africa has gone in the past year. This changed perception about tourism prices, coupled with tough economic times in the UK and the strong Rand “…is proving problematic for us all”, he said. He feels that “SA is pricing itself out of the market”. Portfolio of Places has experienced its worst year ever in its more than 20-year existence, we have been told.
Another operator said that it is no longer feasible for local establishments to increase their rates by 10 % annually, in excess of the inflation rate. These increases effect the value for money perception of South Africa, says Louise de Waal of Baobab Travel. She stated that budget accommodation options often are questionable as far as quality goes, and therefore cannot be booked. Tourvest Inbound’s Martin Wiest says that high pricing makes our country less competitive globally.
&Beyond’s Gary Lotter acknowledges that not all accommodation establishments have increased their prices above the inflation rate, or at all, but it is the strong Rand that is the root of the problem. He also said that if establishments were to drop their rates, they could receive more business, although this is not guaranteed.
Westrip also complained about establishments charging their direct clients better rates than they do tour operators, even though their clients may be a once-off and tour operators usually are loyal to establishments and book them regularly. De Waal queried the wisdom of last minute rate reductions, and called for early-bird discounts instead.
It is interesting to read that tour operators cry wolf about high rates when it is the operators that are exceptionally greedy in their commission demands. Africa Collection takes 20 % commission on bookings it gives Portfolio of Places clients, on top of close to the entry level R20000 annual advertising costs for the Bed and Breakfast Collection advertisers. While the standard commission rate is 10 %, tour operators tend to do business with establishments if they can get commissions of 20 % or more, leading their business to go to hotels rather than guest houses and B&B’s, which would be far more affordable for tourists.
It may well therefore be the tour operators that are the cause of the loss-of-value-for-money image that they are complaining about!
A survey on the Southern African Travel News website shows that the majority of respondents indicated that they have frozen their rates.
Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage