WESTERN Cape MEC of Finance, Economic Development and Tourism, Garth Strachan, has reiterated his appeal for the province and City of Cape Town to stop their political squabbles and work together to promote the destination ahead of 2010.
 
Strachan on Thursday formally launched www.tourismcapetown.co.za, the new website of provincial and city destination marketer, Cape Town Routes Unlimited’s (CTRU). This comes a week after Cape Town Tourism announced the launch of its own new website, www.capetown.travel.
 
The two entities now separately promote Cape Town after a political fall-out last year which saw the city withdraw its funding from CTRU and appoint CTT as its own destination marketer.
 
Commenting on the situation at a Tourism Destination conference in the city, Strachan said, “It’s the silly season six weeks before the election. Hopefully we will see sense afterwards.” He reiterated earlier appeals to the city by saying, “The door is open. We have to solve this issue at all costs and continue to work together.” Strachan said the province had to cut its other projects to make available an additional grant of R3,5m to CTRU to help it finance its 2009 marketing programmes, otherwise it would have had to severely have cut back its marketing a year before the FIFA World Cup.
 
He said the province had invested R90m in CTRU since its inception in 2004 and the organization since had a collective impact of R950m on the province’s economy. The province had spent R207m on marketing and developing the tourism industry in the past five years.
 
CTRU’s new website went online in July 2008. The organization said since then it had received more than 1,7m page views and 295 000 unique visitors. An independent review by the South African Tourism Services Association (SATSA) ranked it among the top DMO (destination marketing office) portals in the country. Joint projects with South African Tourism were in the sign-off stage.