Regulation should be used to help existing industry players as well as those trying to enter the travel and tourism market. This was reiterated at a Ministerial session ahead of Indaba, on May 15.

Policy should not be used to overregulate the sector, said Tourism Minister, Tokozile Xasa. Sustainable growth should be the goal in the travel and tourism sector.

The session looked at new platforms, viewed as ‘disrupters’ to the tourism industry, such as Airbnb and Uber.

These technologies have forced policy makers to play the ‘catch-up’ game to try to bridge the gap between innovation and industry. The Minister emphasised that this, however, should not be used as an excuse to impose tighter regulations that throttled innovation or access for start-ups.

Amadeus IT Group's Angelica Mkok saidthat policy regulations should be drafted with the end user [consumer] in mind. She said it was important to understand what the consumer wanted and that new technologies were emerging because the “consumer would like to be serviced this way”.