Tag Archives: Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company

Table Mountain hits tourism peak!

The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company has achieved its best ever December, with a record 116000 visitors going up Table Mountain in the cable car, up by 65% compared to December 2010.  Visitors were mainly South Africans.

The previous visitor peak was achieved in December 2006, when 112000 visitors went up Table Mountain by cable car, reports ioltravel.  A year ago the company had one of its worst performances, at 70000 visitors, being severely hampered by closures due to strong Southeaster winds.  In December, the Cableway could operate 72 % of the time, compared to only 56% the December a year before, the Cableway operation being heavily weather-dependent, and having to close when windspeeds go above a safe level of operation.  The Cableway company has also introduced an online ticket sale  service, to reduce the long queues which have been common during the summer seasons.

The Cableway opened 82 years ago, and took 6000 visitors up the mountain in December 1929.

Table Mountain has been named a New7Wonders of Nature, a provisional accolade still subject to verification.   Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company CEO Sabine Lehmann said: “Table Mountain’s campaign to be included in the New7Wonders of Natures has raised awareness of our natural icon, and it seemed that many South Africans wanted to see the icon for themselves”.

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

Cape Town Tourism: poor marketing comes from the top!

Yesterday we wrote about the poorly maintained website of Cape Town Tourism, and had naively hoped that our contribution would have helped its Communications Manager Skye Grove to fix all the embarrassing errors on the site. Sadly, nothing has been fixed at all.

Finding this state of affairs unacceptable, especially during this peak tourism period, I called City Councillor Grant Pascoe’s office (Tel 021 400-1346), and his secretary kindly gave me his cellphone number (082 748 3998) when I told her that the esteemed Councillor has not once returned my calls nor responded to my Tweets and e-mails addressed to him in the past few months.  The Councillor answered his cellphone immediately, and was in a noisy space sounding like a children’s playground, and said that he could not speak to me because he was in a meeting with a colleague, and was off anyway, and was only back in the office on Monday.  I asked him to confirm that he would indeed call back, given his poor record of non-response in the past year, which unleashed a torrent of abuse from him, saying that he didn’t know why he should call back because of what I have written about him on this blog, and demanded an apology first!  I said that I have only written about his rudeness in not responding to me. When I asked him to elaborate about what else I had written that had offended him, he told me to read my blog, indicating that he could not remember! Over and above highlighting the Councillor’s non-communication rudeness, we wrote about his Design Indaba PR gaffe!

Councillor Pascoe has been a DA Councillor for Westridge in Mitchell’s Plain for the past ten years, appears to have studied theology for a year, with Who’s Who falsely claiming that he has a degree in theology, has been chairperson of the Cape Town Metro region of the Democratic Alliance, and has been Mayoral Committee Member for Social Development & Special Projects since 2010, his profile on Linked In says, but his Twitter profile states that he serves on the Executive Mayoral Committee for Tourism, Events and Marketing.  Last year Mr Pascoe stood for Mayor of Cape Town.  The R40 million Cape Town Tourism budget buck stops with him! Interestingly, the Councillor has protected his Tweets, mainly focused on cricket, not understanding that they are readable via Hootsuite!  A Twitter exchange about my call to Mr Pascoe this morning has attracted the attention of DA Leader Helen Zille, and she has requested Western Cape provincial Minister of Tourism Alan Winde to get involved.

It gets even better: Ian Bartes has been the Chairman of Cape Town Tourism for the past four years, and is the Services Standards Manager of the Airports Company in Cape Town (Tel 021 935-3860). He is on leave, only returning to the office on 26 January!  Interesting is his role at ACSA, being quality standards, and one wonders if he reads what Cape Town Tourism puts on its website, as the content should not meet his approval.  Trying to obtain his cellphone number via Cape Town Tourism was a major mission, marked top secret!  Deputy Chairman Sabine Lehmann, CEO of the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company (Tel 021 424-0015, cell 082 305 9019), was in a meeting, but her office sweetly passed on her cellphone number, also designated as top secret.  She took my call to her cellphone immediately, even though she was in the meeting, and has promised to call back.

Cape Town Tourism Acting CEO Enver Duminy (Tel 021 426-4260) was contactable, and said that he had been at work over the festive period, for which I congratulated him, but admitted to not having seen our blogpost about Cape Town Tourism’s out-of-date website yesterday.  He promised to get back to me once he had read it.

POSTSCRIPT 5/1:  I am impressed with Enver Duminy’s response time, as Acting CEO of Cape Town Tourism – his CEO Mariette du Toit-Helmbold could take a leaf from his book!  This was his reply: “I would like to thank you for bringing some of your website comments to my attention, and the team have been tasked to review your points and amend spelling errors and remove expired content where and when possible, and as appropriate. Thank you for highlighting  the “Beyond Cape Town” sections, which the team will look into, and with the support our LTO and RTO colleagues in the regions, provide us with updated content to populate as such”.

POSTCRIPT 5/1:  Sabine Lehmann has just called back, and refuses to comment as a Cape Town Tourism Board member, and neither as Deputy Chairman in the absence of her Chairman Ian Bartes.  She was not aware of all the website errors, and will take it to the next Board meeting, she said.

POSTSCRIPT 9/1: Not surprisingly Councillor Grant Pascoe did not return my call today, as he had promised last week!

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

Cape Town festive season tourism up on 2010

Cape Town is bursting at the seams, and will get even fuller from today onwards, when international visitors fly into the city after their Christmas celebrations with their families.  While the occupancy for the festive season (i.e. Christmas – 8 January) is improved, the overall occupancy for December is on a par with that of last December.

The Cape Argus front page story headline ‘Tourists pour into Cape’ was based on a 4% increase in domestic arrivals in November, relative to the year before, and is therefore sensationalist and incorrect. Expectations of the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company (100000 visitors estimated for December) and the V&A Waterfront (3 million visitors expected in December) are optimistic, but comparative 2010 figures are not provided .   The newspaper, which also reported a 14% increase in international arrivals on 21 December, relative to the ‘last festive season’, appears to be confused about the definition of the ‘festive season’, seen by the industry as only starting with Christmas, and running until the day before the first working day in January (as early as 3 January, or 9 January for most).

The article also quoted Cape Town Tourism in saying that the arrival statistics were not reflected in the occupancy levels of accommodation establishments in the city, many arrivals staying with friends and family.  Cape Town Tourism’s market research methods have been dubious in the past, and do not appear to reflect that many international visitors now own a house or apartment in the Cape.  The tourism body spokesperson Skye Grove also blamed price sensitivity for hotels and guest houses not being fully booked, due the ‘current economic conditions’. One wonders how Cape Town Tourism drew this conclusion, without interviewing tourists.   She also blames the unfilled beds on the 40 % increased room capacity in the past four years, in preparation for the 2010 World Cup, with a current total bed availability of 60 000 in greater Cape Town, she said.  Ms Grove did not mention the feedback about Cape Town having become an expensive destination.  She also said that tourists are “looking for added value and expect excellent service. They are, more than ever, prepared to shop around for the best deal when it comes to experiences, food, drinks and accommodation”.

The competing tourism body Cape Town Routes Unlimited provided a different statistic, its CEO Calvyn Gilfellan saying that 20 % more beds had been added in the past two years, and his body expected a ‘slight return to normality’, without a definition thereof.  He warned the industry to not overcharge: “Competition is tough, people know they have to be realistic with their rates”. Alan Winde, Western Cape Minister of Tourism and Finance, echoed Gilfellan, in stating that there would be a slight improvement in visitor numbers, but he warned the tourism industry to ‘…don’t expect fireworks’.  He added: “The market is tough and is going to become even more competitive, so we have to up our game. Quality and service will set us apart from the rest”.

Whale Cottage Camps Bay is likely to finish December with an occupancy of 70 %, slightly up on December 2010, but a huge drop from the 90+% occupancy of December 2007 – 2009.  What is different is that the guest house is fully booked for the Christmas days, which is an improvement on the past years. However, the first two weeks of December were much quieter than in the past.  A similar pattern is evident in Franschhoek, although the occupancy level for the month is below 20%, while occupancy in Hermanus is much reduced relative to last December.  The Mount Nelson Hotel is not full at the moment, but will fill up later this week, one of the managers told me yesterday.

For Cape Town to be a world class city offering quality service, as per the call by Minister Winde, restaurants should be encouraged to open on Christmas Day, and particularly in the evening. Kloof Street is a restaurant street boasting 35 restaurants, of which only three were open yesterday evening, two of them being franchise restaurants, and Mason’s being filled with tourists staying in the Tamboerskloof and Gardens areas.  The service at Mason’s was particularly slow, the owner apologetically saying that all his staff had called in sick, so patrons had to expect a 25 minute waiting time for food (my cappuccino took this long to make too). Poor spelling on their Christmas dinner menu does not give our city a professional image.

Newspaper headlines about the tourism season should wait until the festive season has ended, and should be based on reliable information, journalists having to be responsible in their information sources. Cape Town tourism bodies should be professional in conducting their market research!  The increased tourism numbers, mainly domestic tourists, do not seem to be the result of any marketing efforts by Cape Town Tourism or by Cape Town Routes Unlimited. Cape Town Tourism launched its ‘You don’t need a holiday, you need Cape Town’ campaign to huge fanfare at the World Travel Market in London and at its AGM in the past two months, but the campaign seems to have run out of steam, and is not visible in any media.

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

Cloud hangs over New7Wonders of Nature Table Mountain!

When Table Mountain was in the running for New7Wonders of Nature, the City of Cape Town ran an advertising campaign, spending more than R1 million to encourage South Africans to vote for Cape Town’s icon.  Voting for Table Mountain was motivated as the tourism revenue benefit of R1,4 billion per annum and for its resultant job creation.  Now a report has shown that the estimates were based on 2007 tourism information!

The Cape Times journalist Zara Nicholson has taken a lot of flack for her report on the New7Wonders competition, in having questioned the credibility of its organisers, and the monies that were generated via vote SMS’s.   Last week Ms Nicholson wrote another article about the tourism benefit, and has questioned the accuracy of the projections made by tourism consultancy Grant Thornton, having found that their projections about the tourism benefits of having been named New7Wonders of Nature were based on outdated 2007 tourism arrival statistics. 2007 was the last good year our tourism industry experienced, and our experience is that tourism has reduced steadily every year since 2008, and halved in the past five years.

The Grant Thornton study was commissioned by the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company, and projected that the Table Mountain Cableway would attract 155000 more visitors, a 20 % increase, which they translated into a R1,4 billion tourism revenue increase per year, for the next five years. In their short report, Grant Thornton had estimated that 70 % of the new arrivals to Cape Town would be international visitors (109000 in total, and 9000 per month), 31000 domestic visitors, and 15500 Capetonians, based on the experience of the winners of the 2007 New7Wonders competition.  However, the world was not in recession in 2007, and the tourism industry was projected at that time to grow by leaps and bounds.

Grant Thornton gained notoriety during the soccer World Cup last year, in having vastly overestimated the visitor numbers and the resultant financial benefit that the event would have. We have seen that all the wonderful international accolades that have been awarded to Cape Town during the course of this year have made little impact on tourism.

It has gone very quiet around Table Mountain and its New7Wonder status, given the proviso of the announcement of the seven New7Wonders that results are only provisional, and that the count is subject to verification and audit in the next two months, a bizarre conclusion to this highly publicised competition. Cape Town Tourism and the City of Cape Town did not qualify Table Mountain’s win status, whereas the cities linked to the other six New7Wonders were very specific about talking about their ‘provisional’ win.

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