Tag Archives: Tweeting

Cape Town Tourism’s outgoing Chairman admits to failure in addressing Seasonality!

The article about Seasonality in Southern African Tourism Update on Thursday, quoting outgoing Chairman of Cape Town Tourism Ian Bartes, was surprising in its honesty in admitting that ‘Cape Town needs an orchestrated and cohesive effort by the public and private sector to change its seasonality problem, which has not improved over the past decade despite numerous winter tourism campaigns‘!  Surprising too is that he states that attempts to contain Seasonality have been unsuccessful, which means that he is pointing a finger at Cape Town Tourism, which has been tasked with addressing Seasonality.

Mr Bartes expanded by saying that Seasonality is the reason why most international airlines (and SAA too, one can assume) do not service the Cape Town route all year round, and ‘why prices are hiked over the season to make up for winter losses‘!

In the past 10 years Cape Town has been 200 000 passengers short in each of the winter months relative to the good summer months, to justify a year-round airline service, and Mr Bartes admitted that ‘We haven’t changed the situation in 10 years’! This admission is ironic, as Mr Bartes has been the Chairman of Cape Town Tourism for the past eight years, and should have known better than any other Board director how the airlines work, and how dire the winter situation is for them.  Interestingly, Mr Bartes offers the solution to Seasonality, and one wonders why he did not practice what he preaches in his capacity as Chairman of Cape Town Tourism: ‘Unless we address the seasonal drop we will not get the air access we want. We need to stimulate supply by talking to the airlines and we need to stimulate demand by investing in more events in the winter months’.

The tourism industry has called on Cape Town Tourism to schedule more events in winter, and it has been promised year on year by its CEO Mariette du Toit-Helmbold that this would happen.  Yet no new events have been added to the Cape Town events calendar in the winter months of May – August.

Of greater concern is the future projection by Mr Bartes, stating that ‘demand in general is dwindling due to the economic crisis in key source markets and soaring fuel prices pushing up airfares. He explained that the seasonal airline service reflects the decline in the number of tourists from Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and France, whereas arrivals from Africa, Asia, North America, and the Middle East are increasing.  In the twelve month period from April 2011 to March this year passenger numbers of 8,6 million at Cape Town International only grew by 4,6%, while Mr Bartes projects zero growth in arrivals in the next two years. Just more than 80% of passengers (7,1 million) arriving at Cape Town International are domestic passengers, and the arrivals are expected to grow in the next two years, while the 1,5 million international arrivals are expected to decline over the same period.

The article did not state what the occasion of the interview with Mr Bartes was, and has not been issued by Cape Town Tourism as a media statement.  It is unlikely that the interview was conducted in Mr Bartes’ capacity of Service Standards Manager at Cape Town International, as Mr Bartes is not the airport spokesperson.

Seasonality is a harsh reality for the tourism industry in the Western Cape, and bites deep into the pockets of all its operators in our industry.  Monies made in the six good summer months is cancelled out in paying operational costs and fixed expenses in the winter months, meaning that many break even or make a loss, as has been the case since 2010 in particular.  Cape Town Tourism’s pathetic attempts at hosting events such as the Travel ‘Bloggers’ Tweet Up in August, and the ‘100 Women 100 Wine’ event it ran last year and is repeating next month, its ad campaign with Thompson Tours in the Sunday Times, and its constant Tweeting at the expense of all other marketing communication, have made no impact in bringing more visitors to Cape Town in winter!   By contrast, Franschhoek Wine Valley has worked for years in hosting events in winter, its Bastille Festival filling the town on the weekend closest to Bastille Day, no matter how bad the weather is.  The tourism body has grown its portfolio of events to one a month, which means that many tourism businesses are close to full on one weekend a month at least. One hopes that new City of Cape Town Place Marketing Director Rory Viljoen will make Seasonality his priority in developing the Strategic Plan for marketing Cape Town!

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

Ratepayers pay for 10 day City of Cape Town/Cape Town Tourism Turkish Treat in Istanbul!

Even though an insider had informed me about a trip by Cape Town Tourism CEO Mariette du Tout-Helmbold with Mayor of Cape Town Patricia de Lille some time ago, it was a surprise to see Mrs Helmbold Tweeting so actively on behalf of Istanbul, and that a delegation of at least  10 City of Cape Town and Cape Town Tourism persons is in Istanbul, as this Tweet by Cape Town Tourism informed: “Our CEO @MariettedTH is part of a Cape Town trade exchange delegation en-route to Turkey with Mayor @PatriciaDeLille & @Grantpascoe“.

A photograph which Mrs Helmbold Tweeted yesterday showed the team of ten in their Sunday casuals, and includes Councillor Grant Pascoe, Mayoral Committee Member for Tourism, Events and Marketing; Anton Groenewald, who heads up Pascoe’s department in the City offices; City Manager Achmat Ebrahim; Cape Town Tourism Chairman Ian Bartes who is ACSA Cape Town’s Manager of Service Standards in his day job; Enver Duminy, Mrs Helmbold’s right-hand man; Inge Dykman, Marketing and Communications Officer at Cape Town Tourism; a Wesgro staff member; and, surprisingly, Chef Peter Ayub of cooking school and catering company ‘A Sense of Taste’!  They will be away from Cape Town for ten days.

Turkey has not been designated as a source of tourism for Cape Town by Wesgro or Cape Town Tourism, so one wonders why Cape Town Tourism sent four representatives on this sight-seeing trip.  An article on Turquoise Harmony Institute’s website provides an idea of what the delegation is doing (other than visit endless fruit markets, as per Mrs Helmbold’s Tweets!): “The Executive Mayor of Cape Town, Ms. Patricia De Lille has visited Turkey as the guest of Turquoise Harmony Institute. THI regional director Mr Savas Karabulut has accompanied the delegation which held meetings including with the Mayor of Istanbul and visited many sites. Ms De Lille visited skills training institutions run by the Istanbul Municipality adn (sic) also paid a visit to the construction site of the under-sea tunnel which will connect europian (sic) side of Istanbul to Asian part. The delegation also visited numbe rof (sic) NGOs adn (sic) academic institutions and had briefings on teir (sic) activities”.

The only Tweet related to tourism came from Mrs Helmbold yesterday morning: “Out and about with our hosts from Istanbul Tourism to learn more about this incredible city and explore opportunities for Cape Town”, and this morning she Tweeted:”Official trade and tourism exchange day between #CapeTown and #Istanbul with top media, trade and the tourism boards and local government”.

The City of Cape Town issued a media release last Friday, announcing its trip to Turkey, motivating it as a follow-up trip to one earlier this year: “Indeed, we laid a solid foundation with Turkish investors earlier this year in a scoping trip mapping the opportunities for business investment in Cape Town and export opportunities for our own businesses. So positive was the reception that we will be travelling back to Turkey today to cement those opportunities and build on key linkages in the tourism sector. A delegation, led by myself and the City Manager, Mr Achmat Ebrahim, and joined by members of WESGRO, the investments promotion vehicle for the region and Cape Town Tourism, the main vehicle for promotion of the City region abroad.  Our schedule is a tight one, packed as it is into only a few days. However, we will be meeting with key industry and government leaders to establish the economic linkages that will open the Turkish market to Cape Town in numerous ways. A key focus of ours will be to market what Cape Town has to offer, not only as a summer destination but a regional leader for businesses looking to establish a presence in the Southern African market. Too often people talk about attracting investment, but do nothing to accomplish it. We cannot expect new markets to appreciate what we have to offer if we make no effort to tell them. It is a fact of business, and of life, that only the most tenacious sales pitches succeed, delivered by people who will not give up”. No Tweets to date have indicated that meetings to achieve the goal of economic linkages have been held!

There has been no media release from Cape Town Tourism to justify this expenditure of monies and time, when Cape Town should be preparing itself for the upcoming summer season and attracting the maximum number of tourists to our beautiful city.  It is hardly likely that they will come from Turkey, despite the introduction of four direct flights per week between Cape Town and Istanbul from end October. Instead, it appears that Mrs Helmbold’s active ‘Turkish Delight’ Tweeting for Istanbul will see an exodus of Capetonians visiting Istanbul soon!

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

Chef Bruce Robertson returns to Cape Town, plain sailing at The Boat House!

After a three year absence from the restaurant scene in Cape Town, former The Showroom Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant Chef Bruce Robertson has returned to Cape Town to create The Boat House home eatery in Scarborough. His cuisine and plating is as exciting as it was before he left, and he is not only a perfect chef but the perfect host too.

We got to know Chef Bruce when he opened The Showroom with its open kitchen, which meant that he was in the foreground, showing his great ability to chat to clients, and to get them to return.  A change in career plan led him to cook at sixteen private camps in Southern Africa, spanning Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, and the Okavango, cooking his special dishes in often challenging kitchen conditions, and hosting guests.  The love for this extraordinary lifestyle grew from a link he had to an American tour operator company, which brought adventurous gourmet tourists to the Cape, and Chef Bruce led them on exciting culinary journeys, usually preparing their meals out in the open, enjoying the challenge of the outdoors to create unforgettable holidays for the visitors.  He has moved from cooking with passion, to lifestyle cooking, and his beautiful young daughter was the most important reason to bring him back to Cape Town, he said.  The setting of The Boat House in Scarborough, close to the beach, is perfect, and the beach house has a guest room he rents out too.

From the prim and proper Chef Bruce that I remember, in his white chef’s uniform at The Showroom, the new Chef ‘Barefoot Bruce’ is dressed in jeans and a white shirt, barefoot, and looking very relaxed and unstressed. The welcome was a warm hug, and included a tour of the house, his assistant Tom offering us a glass of sparkling wine, an exceptional Cederberg Blanc de Blancs Brut not commercially available elsewhere. We initially sat on the upstairs terrace, another four guests having booked too. A surprise was to learn that Chef Bruce grew up in Pretoria.

One should not think that Chef Bruce’s food is as casual as his dress. Effortlessly he was preparing the food in his open plan kitchen/dining room.  As one chats to one’s table companions one is not so focused on what Chef Bruce is doing in the kitchen.  He comes to the tables regularly, checking all the time that all is in order and to one’s satisfaction, and he provides snippets of information about his food or about the Cederberg wines.  Chef Bruce not only has culinary skills, but he could recareer as an interior decorator too. In eight months he has made a home of the house, with all his special things, creating groupings of this and that,  with lots of family photographs, and his past restaurant awards grace the walls with many other special pictures.  He has two rustic wooden tables covered with glass tops and matching chairs, with the odd ghost chair (Chef Bruce probably was the first restaurateur to use them in a restaurant, at The Showroom), a reminder of his great career.  If there is one thing that will stand out about the lunch then it is the most beautiful composition of half a lime, olive oil, salt and pepper, butter, and the cutlery, on a sheet of miniature tiles, providing perfect ‘compartments’ for the items, and doubling up as a side plate.  A beautiful warm mini-seedloaf was added to this collection.

There is no menu or winelist, and Chef Bruce told us that he almost exclusively serves Cederberg wines, ‘wines with altitude’, the area having a unique terror with very hot summers and snow in winter.  He found the Cederberg wines after an extensive search to find the perfect wines to match his cooking.  Chef Bruce explained that he wanted us to have three wines for our savoury dishes, and that he did not want to prescribe which wine we should pair with which dish.  The 2011 Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc wines have pronounced aromas, and the Sustainable Rosé is made from Shiraz grapes from a single block, a lovely pairing with the main course.  For dessert we were offered a glassful of Cederberg Shiraz 2008 as well as a lovely Bukettraube 2011, the latter playing the role of a dessert wine, Chef Bruce said.

Chef Bruce also told us that there is no choice on his menu, serving a “Table d’Hôte, lunch served to guests as a warm home gathering, where the host has prepared what the guests will be served.  My home is yours”. His menu is mainly fish-based, given his location and theme, and he gave us a little green SASSI-friendly lecture, confirming that he will not touch red nor orange categorised fish types, and therefore salmon and kingklip will not be prepared in his home.  He also said that 99% of his produce comes from within 10 km of his home, keeping it local and carbon footprint friendly.  One has the choice of a three course or five course meal, and we chose the former, while the other table had the latter. Chef Bruce adjusts the serving time to the number of courses each table orders, and we ran behind the other table because of all of our talking and Tweeting!    Not having a menu, it is hard to capture exactly which ingredients make up each dish, as Chef Bruce talks as fast as before, so I asked him to e-mail it to me afterwards, to make sure that I did justice to each dish. To date, Chef Bruce has not repeated any of his dishes, always challenging himself, and keeping it fresh for his guests.  Chef Bruce introduced Tom as his Restaurant Manager, sommelier, waiter, and right hand man, and he was constantly checking on my water glass, and poured the six wines.

Our first course was a Seafood Chowder with home-made gnocchi dumplings, chorizo, courgettes, baby basil, a spicy prawn bisque, and seaweed confetti, the latter most probably not seen or picked up by most.  Chef Bruce is proud of his handiwork, and because things are so relaxed, he comes to the tables to show the special little touches, something one would not experience in a regular restaurant.  For the main course Chef Bruce had prepared pan-fried Cape Gurnard, a fish I had not eaten before.  It is also called the Cape Sea Robin or ‘korhaanvis’. While not the easiest fish to clean and prepare, Chef Bruce likes using it because it is so plentiful.  He served it with baby spinach, his own spicy home-made tomato and olive chutney, finger beans, thyme, Niçoise cream, and cream of olive oil potato, all making for a beautiful dish with interesting flavours.

The ‘Cape Malay dessert’ required quite a bit of explanation.  Chef Bruce made a panna cotta-like melkkos Boerber jelly from sago, wonderful samoosas filled with stewed fruit and Old Brown Sherry, chocolate meringue sprinkled with Nachtmusik liqueur, malva pudding with rooibos liqueur, yoghurt, honey caviar, and pomegranate molasses, a beautiful collection of different tastes all served on a pure white tile, a proudly Cape Town dish! The ‘honey caviar’ would not have meant anything to us at all, and we probably would not even have picked up the little balls, had Chef Bruce not come to our table before serving the dessert, and asking us to guess what they were. We could taste the sweetness, but could never have identified them to be pollen. Although our 3-course menu did not include a cheese course, Chef Bruce wanted me to try it. Presented on a wooden board with textural bumps created via caramelised sugar, it consisted of ‘rondebokkie’ cheese I had never heard of before, mature cheddar, black fig chutney (‘suurvy’), mint, and a chilli bite. Eating at The Boat House is not only for sustenance, but it is most educational too, because Chef Bruce is so excited about his discoveries that he spontaneously shares them with his guests.  The second course in the 5-course menu is a home smoked snoek pâte served with a fresh pea and mascarpone cream on ciabatta, with Chef Bruce’s kitchen greens.

While Scarborough is as quiet and isolated from the rest of Cape Town as it was on a last visit more than ten years, everything has changed, now having one of the hottest secret eateries in this suburb, worth the drive of about 60 km from the city centre.  One can also book a picnic basket from Chef Bruce, and one is sure to be equally spoilt, given that Chef Bruce originally designed Warwick’s gourmet picnic.

The Boat House, 36 Beach Road, Scarborough.  Tel 083 305 8533. www.chefbrucerobertson.com Twitter: @ChefBruce  Monday – Saturday lunch.  Maximum of 12 guests.  3-courses R325, 5-courses R495. Must be pre-booked.

POSTSCRIPT 3/11: Chef Bruce Robertson moved from Scarborough to Simonstown, where he opened The Flagship, a restaurant and guest house.  Very very sadly he passed away from leukemia today, diagnosed only a few days ago.

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

TELKOM Sweet Service and Overstrand Municipality Sour Service Award

The Sweet Service Award goes to Gerry of the St George’s Mall branch of TELKOM, who helped me rectify a problem with the paid-for itemised billing on the telephone account not showing cell phone calls made, the most costly calls made on any business line.  The telephone account had an (unrequested) National-call only setting, instead of an All-call setting!   Gerry printed out the whole account again, and fixed the incorrect setting.  This is the second time that he has been helpful in sorting out a billing query, and in general the friendliness at this Customer Service branch far exceeds that offered by the Sea Point branch.

The Sour Service Award goes to the Overstrand Municipality.  Invoices for water, electricity, and rates and taxes in Hermanus are issued as late as the 28th of the month, meaning that one only receives them in Cape Town around the 10th.  Payment is expected by the 20th, and a R300 penalty per invoice is levied whenever this payment date is not met.  This means two trips to Pick ‘n Pay per month, to pay via their Easy Pay facility, as the other account payments cannot wait so long.  None of the other three municipalities that we deal with are so late with their invoices and so punitive with their penalty charges. I called the Overstrand Municipality, requesting an earlier invoice date, but this cannot be done, as all invoices are issued on the same date!  This is the e-mailed response I received to my call, from Elsabe Liebenberg, the Senior Accountant of the Overstrand Municipality: “Overstrand Municipality Customer Care, Credit Control and Debt Collection Policy stated the following: 6.4.5 (a) Accounts are delivered monthly.  It is the customers responsibility to enquire from the Municipality should an account not be received in order to ensure timely payment and to obtain a duplicate account when the account is not delivered during the normal billing cycle.  All our policies are available on our website www.overstrand.gov.za. See the following note on the back of Overstrand Municipality (sic). If no account has been received by the 10th of a month, a copy should be obtained from the Municipality. This month the accounts were posted late due to the knew (sic) lay out of the account and we apologise for this.  From November 2011 it will be back to normal again.  We calculate the accounts on the 25th of each month and send it within 4 days.  Although the due date is on the 20th of the month, you are welcome to pay it on the first of the month.  You are welcome to phone our offices and request your amount.” The ‘Customer Care’ wording in the Policy is a misnomer!

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