Tag Archives: unemployment

WhaleTales Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines: 30 July

WhaleTalesTourism, Food, and Wine news headlines

*   Unemployment is at a six year high at 25%,  with a surprising figure of 36% for ‘extended unemployment rate‘ recorded too, being ‘people who have given up looking for jobs‘!

*   ‘Reconsider‘, the TV commercial created by Ireland/Davenport for SA Tourism, has already been seen more than 700000 times on YouTube, and will also be flighted on CNN and National Geographic, reaching ‘more than 1,3 billion households’, the media statement of the agency claims!  The commercial highlights the beauty of our country, but also the specialness of our people.  Agency MD Philip Ireland said: ‘We were very lucky to have a client who not only believed in us but who stayed incredibly close to the creative process, and refused to accept anything less than world class from us. At every step there was an absolute refusal to compromise. South Africa is a world class destination and it was imperative that the thinking and the execution were not just flawless, but better than anything the category had seen before‘, to which SA Tourism CEO Thulani Nzima added: ‘It puts the South African people at the heart of South Africa’s appeal’. 

UK tourists looking for tailor-made holiday packages and adventure!

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

‘Cape of Good Business’ is ‘cool’ in winter too!

Three directors of Cape Town Tourism and heads of important Cape Town business tourism businesses have joined forces to make a plea for how “cool” Cape Town is in the winter months, a period typically plagued by seasonality, with far reduced accommodation bookings, which has an impact on all sectors of the tourism industry. 

In an article in the Cape Times last week, Guy Lundy of Accelerate, Ian Bartes of Cape Town International airport, and Rashid Toefy of the Cape Town International Convention Centre wrote that of all South African cities, Cape Town is unique in its seasonality, which “makes it hard for the hospitality industry to be sustainable”.   They add: “With 18  five-star hotels now operating in the city, we must find ways to increase visitor numbers during winter.”  The tourism leaders says it is not a surprise that Cape Town sees so many restaurants opening and then closing, in that they build restaurants to meet capacity support in summer, but cannot see this through in the winter months when business falls away.  They also state that the number of passenger arrivals in April and May is half of that in December and January.

They blame this on the positioning and marketing of Cape Town as mainly a leisure destination, which “always seem to feature the Waterfront, Clifton and the Winelands on their covers”, with not enough promotion of the city as an investment and business destination.   Conference facilities, factories and office blocks do not feature in the city’s marketing collateral.   They call for more direct international flights to Cape Town, and more flights between the city and other African cities, to make Cape Town a world business destination, and a global African city, given that it already has a world class airport, good hotels, excellent infrastructure, ‘some of the finest restaurants’, natural beauty, entertainment, world-class technology, sophisticated business networks, and a favourable time zone for doing business with the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 

To make Cape Town a global business destination, it needs to be considered for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (the M.I.C.E. market).    The Convention Centre is ranked 34th in the world in size of business, and it plans to double its capacity to reach its goal of making the top ten list.    Winter is an ideal time for conferences, the writers say, in that most activities take place indoors.   Whilst conference delegates spend less time in a city on average, their average spend is higher than that of a leisure tourist.   The writers also state that the businesses of the Western Cape, e.g. food and wine, oil and gas, boat-building and ship repair, design, film, technology, renewable energy, asset management, business process outsourcing and medical research should expose their businesses to overseas markets via exhibitions and conferences, to attract business travellers to Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape, including Winelands, West Coast and Overberg towns.

The World Cup demonstrated what a good winter weather city Cape Town can be, with rain on only three of the match days, and snowfalls on the mountains for a short while during the soccer tournament month.  The soccer fans were not put off by the rain and cold, and their ‘gees’ was not dampened in any way.   This leads to a renewed call for the ‘green season’ to be marketed in the winter months.  The cooler Cape weather is attractive to visitors from the Middle East, and the Asian countries, who have to endure hot and humid weather at that time.  The writers also suggest a winter sale, which reduces accommodation, restaurants, and clothing, as is done in Paris, Singapore and New York.   The writers seem unaware that the small accommodation industry has been leading the tourism sector for years, in reducing its rates by as much as half in winter.  This year the restaurants in Cape Town and the Winelands also came to the party, and offered good winter specials, some even extending these into current summer specials.

We support the writers’ call for more events to be hosted to attract visitors, but it is sad to read that the City of Cape Town does not have enough funding to support big events (there is activity by Cape Town Routes Unlimited in marketing a small number of approved events, all hosted in summer months).  

If Cape Town had no seasonality, airlines would fly into the city all year round, and would bring travellers, making tourism business more viable and reducing unemployment.   It is for this reason that the business tourism leaders ask that the tourism industry get on board the Cape of Good Business!  

It is interesting that the three writers are Board members of Cape Town Tourism, which focuses almost exclusively on leisure tourism, while the business tourism business that they are pleading for is in the domain of Cape Town Routes Unlimited, on which Board only ACSA is represented, and on which the three tourism leaders may have been able to make a greater contribution than at Cape Town Tourism.

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

Indlovu Project in Khayelitsha reaches top of the World (Bank)

I visited Khayelitsha for the first time in about 15 years yesterday, to attend the opening and launch of the Indlovu Project, a community development project aimed at addressing the high unemployment, large numbers of teenage pregnancies, lack of sanitation, and prevalence of TB and HIV, in Monwabisi Park in the township.  The invitation came for SAfm presenter Nancy Richards, and I am delighted to have made the time to attend the opening of this fantastic project.

I had not heard of the project prior to the invitation, so went to the ceremony with an open mind.  I had no fear of driving through Khayelitsha, and felt that little had changed.  When I first moved to Cape Town twenty years ago I ran a Market Research and PR company called Relationship Marketing, and we were the first company to take clients into the townships, to show them the fantastic entrepreneurial spirit of the township residents, and the diversity of retailing in these suburbs.   I drove past Coca Cola branded spaza shops (miniature supermarkets), shebeens, braaiers of meat for “take aways”, sellers of sanitaryware, beds and building materials, all displayed along Mew Way, the main road through Khayelitsha.  I wondered where these items are stored in case of rain and flooding. 

The Indlovu Project is a collective Youth Centre, guest house, daycare centre, clinic, soup kitchen, and creche, which was established in 2008.  Earlier this year the entire project burnt down in a shack fire.  Bishop’s School came to the assistance immediately, helping to clear the site, and monies were raised to rebuild all the facilities, but on a larger scale and following eco-friendly principles, given the donations received from actor Sir Ian McLellan (who is currently in Cape Town, acting in Samuel Becket’s ‘Waiting for Godot’), The Rotary Club of Claremont, actor Ralph Brown (who is busy filming “Dark Tide” with Halle Berry and brought her to the Project a week ago), the 476 Trust, Enzyme, and Investec Bank.   It is planned to market the Indlovu Project as a Tourism Centre, by offering traditional African meals in the community hall, so that the work of the project may be seen and supported.

But what impressed me the most was the work by and dedication of the Bishop’s Grade 10 boys, who worked in two teams of two on a World Bank project called Evoke – over a ten-week period the boys researched the needs at Indlovu, found solutions, and wrote a blog about their work.   Of the 19 000 scholars that signed up around the world for the World Bank’s Global Giving on-line project, the four Bishop’s scholars came first, and were given $1000 in seed money to grow their projects.   The Ecovillage project of Reid Falconer and Martin Dyer investigated self-sustainability in terms of fruit and vegetable supply, and analysed the soil type in the township, to choose the most suitable type of vegetables and fruit to grow.  The other Bishop’s pair, Emile Nauta and Kishan Chagan, tackled the township problem of shack fires, and developed a fire-resistant paint that costs less than one-tenth of the commercial cost of such paint, by simply adding two ingredients obtainable at pharmacies to the paint.   The boys will be flown to Washington to receive their prize, and are pushing themselves to raise funds to continue their work – one goal being to raise money to paint 1000 shacks by 2012.  The project was demonstrated, by lighting a newspaper painted with their paint, but it did not burn.   What impressed me was that the Bishops children come from well-to-do backgrounds, but it was very obvious that they are very proud participants in this project. 

The Makaze guest house is colourful and homely.  There is no TV, but the kitchen is spacious.  The Bishops’ moms assisted with the interior decor, Lucia Brain being the decorator.  I loved the Lion Match papered wardrobe door, and the recycled items dotted around the guest house, as well as the lamp shades made from buckets in the lounge.  Two bedrooms have bunk beds in them, while the third is the “Presidential Suite”, with a king bed.   Dinner is served to guests, being traditional African food.   The monies made from the guest house operation is used to fund the community soup kitchen.  What makes the guest house fascinating is that it is “green”, in that it was built by the community from sandbags and eco-beams; it is powered by solar energy and gas; and it has earthworm sanitation.

I felt enriched in having spent two hours in Khayelitsha, in experiencing a project opening which was blessed by a sangoma, entertained by proud township dancers and musicians, performing traditional music, that I could see a part of Cape Town that we do not acknowledge being on our doorstep, and experiencing the friendliness of the locals towards us as visitors, with so much goodwill to each other.  I will contribute to the Bishops’ Ecovillage and Fire Retard projects.  I encourage you to do so too. 

Indlovu Project, off Mew Way, Monwabisi Park, Khayelitsha.  Tel (021) 657-1026. http://www.shaster.org.za/index.php/projects/6-indlovu-project/6-indlovu-project.html

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