Tourism: 10 years, tenfold growth
25 June 2004
South Africa continued to defy world tourism trends in 2003, achieving a 4.2% increase in overseas arrivals (not including Africa) compared to 2002 in the face of a 1.3% fall-off in global travel attributed to the conflict in Iraq, fears over the Sars virus and a weak global economy.
Including Africa in the count, total foreign arrivals in the country were up by 1.2% over 2002.
South Africa's tourism growth included an overall 5.3% growth in arrivals from Europe (to 1.3 million arrivals), with 14% growth out of France and just over 3% increases from both Germany and the UK, the country's top three overseas markets. Arrivals from the US increased by 2.7% from 2002 (to 222 139 arrivals).
South Africa's fastest growing tourist market in 2003 was India - boosted by the 2003 Cricket World Cup and the International Indian Film Awards 2003, both hosted in SA - with arrivals increasing by over 20% over 2002, prompting South African Tourism to open
a new country office in Mumbai in April this year.
10 years' exponential growth
SA's exponential tourism growth has coincided with the country's first decade of democracy: arrivals have grown tenfold since 1994, from 640 000 to 6.5 million in 2003.
For Crispian Olver, environmental affairs and tourism director-general, this comes as no surprise.
In an article published in Business Day during Tourism Indaba 2004, the annual tourism trade show that ran at Durban's International Convention Centre from 8-11 May, Olver described tourism as a success story of the new South Africa, "a vibrant, growing industry focusing on everything that is unique about the nation and its people".
"Little more than 10 years ago, the tourism sector was still a minor Cinderella industry struggling to emerge from the apartheid period", Olver wrote in his Business Day article, "Making tourism work for all SA".
"It was severely hampered by
apartheid's global image, and offered a one-dimensional tourism product that did not reflect the rich diversity of SA's peoples and heritage. Most South Africans had no stake in the sector."
Making tourism work for all SA
Indaba 2004, Olver said, reflected the strides the country had made in making the opportunities offered by this booming industry available to all South Africans.
"The fact that a total of 89 black-owned small and medium-sized enterprises will be exhibiting at this year's Indaba, compared with 34 in 2000, is indicative of just how far we have come."
Tourism, Olver noted, is one of the key sectors creating job and business opportunities and bringing foreign exchange into South Africa, contributing more than 7% to the country's gross domestic product.
"Through the Tourism Enterprise Programme, for example, more than 600 black-owned tourism enterprises have been assisted and 10 000 jobs created."
Recent
marketing campaigns, and a government tourism growth strategy based on detailed market segmentation research, were now taking effect, Olver said.
"However, our success as a tourism nation has, more importantly, been based on a very solid infrastructure and set of institutions built up in the past 10 years. At the core of this has been a solid public-private partnership in tourism, helped by the founding of the Tourism Business Council of SA in 1996 as 'one voice for the tourism industry'.
"In 1997 Satour was radically restructured into South African Tourism. Together with private sector contributions - which now make up 25% of its budget - the budget for our international marketing has grown from R60-million five years ago to R418-millon today."
The Tourism, Hospitality and Sport Education and Training Authority was set up in 2000 to ensure skills planning, training and quality assurance, and in 2001 the Tourism Grading Council of SA was created to improve standards
and client care in the industry.
"The tourism product has also undergone some radical changes in the past 10 years", Olver said. "Our product now capitalises better on South Africa's unique selling proposition: our people, diversity, culture and natural heritage.
"Eco-tourism has been boosted by the listing of four world heritage sites, and the establishment of six transfrontier conservation areas to encourage regional tourism growth. A new movement relating to 'responsible tourism' and sustainable development is gaining ground."
SA is now also a strong player in the meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions area, Olver noted, with major conference facilities - including the international convention centres in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town - leading to South Africa's growing reputation as one of the best international conferencing destinations.
No room for complacency
Olver warned against complacency, however.
"The global market is tough and overtraded. Tourism product is being offered at rock-bottom prices. Our levels of service do not always match global benchmarks.
"To defend our position, and continue to grow, we must constantly improve on our value-for-money offer as a destination."
The industry, Olver said, had been caught off-guard by the strengthening of the rand, revealing "weaknesses in pricing strategies that sought short-term gains over long-term growth".
The entire value chain of the industry, he said, needed scrutiny if it was to remain internationally competitive.
The government, for its part, had work to do, Olver said: both in making its services more efficient and in removing blockages to tourism growth in areas such as immigration, safety and security, and airline capacity.
South Africa also had to do much more in aligning its efforts to market and brand the country.
Need for a unified 'Brand SA'
The
International Marketing Council, Olver noted, "has spent the past few years putting together a unified 'Brand SA' that sells SA as 'alive with possibility'. Public and private-sector marketing campaigns need to link with and reinforce this brand, rather than continue our fragmented selling work in global markets."
The country also needed to keep on building "the broader ownership South Africans feel regarding tourism". Visitors' experiences of South Africa, he said, were rooted "in how we treat them as a general public - a welcoming smile, a hand of friendship, an offer of assistance.
"To get there, though, we need to make sure the benefits of tourism are more widely spread. This means continuing to build a representative industry that offers opportunities to all South Africans."
SouthAfrica.info reporter. "Making tourism work for all SA" was first published in Business Day, 10 May 2004
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