Shake-up for Cape Town tourism

Recent events have seen funds pulled from provincial tourism authority Cape Town Routes Unlimited. Hilka Birns finds out whether ‘political football’ is to blame…

Tourism industry to get greater say in marketing Cape Town THE marketing of Cape Town is in a state of flux just 680 days before it faces its biggest challenge – hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Cape Town Routes Unlimited (CTRU), the official destination marketing organisation of the Western Cape and the city, suffered a reputation-damaging and financially impacting setback when the City of Cape Town stopped funding it last month. The city cited unhappiness with CTRU’s efficiency as the reason, but public mud slinging soon elucidated the crux of the problem: political disunity between the two CTRU stakeholders, the African National Congress-led province and the opposition Democratic Alliance-dominant city. For most of the past year tourism became a political football, while the focus should have been on not losing the game plan. Now the city has asked its tourist information service provider, Cape Town Tourism (CTT), to also market the city. Chief executive officer Marïette du Toit-Helmbold says Cape Town Tourism will amend its constitution to extend its mandate to include destination marketing for Cape Town. She believes CTT may be able to sidestep party politics and effectively market Cape Town because it is an a-political and industry-focused association whose executives are elected by its almost 2 500 members. “This allows us to ensure direct industry participation in destination marketing, greater accountability and relevance,” she says. She says the process ahead includes a Memorandum of Understand (MoU) for the transfer of funds from the city to CTT and a special general meeting to share the new road map and constitution with members.  A task team comprising experts on e-marketing, branding, destination marketing and business strategy will compile a new business model. CTT will maintain a lean structure and continue to self-generate a major percentage of its annual budget. “This way of doing business and the lean/mean structure that we maintain, appeals to the city. We will manage destination marketing and the visitor services separately, continuing to cross-leverage partnership funding and participation.” To avoid duplicating what CTRU is doing, CTT will continue to work with all relevant stakeholders, says du Toit-Helmbold.

PICTURE: Cape Town Tourism ceo, Marïette du Toit-Helmbold