One of the biggest challenges for Cape Town Tourism remains that of seasonality. CEO, Enver Duminy, said at a recent media brunch that seasonality had been a challenge for decades for the entire industry, which was why Cape Town Tourism was in the process of developing a seasonality index to measure the fall-off from high season to low season. According to Duminy, once it was possible to measure this, it would help to find ways to improve visitor numbers during low season. 
Duminy said events were a good way to attract more people during the “dead spots” so that the high season could start earlier and last longer. 
Cape Town Tourism, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, has devised as strategy to focus on three issues: income, arrivals and seasonality. Duminy said the organisation’s simple, one-page strategy was 25; 1.5; 365, referring to 25% self-generated income; 1.5 million international visitors and 365 days a year.
He said Cape Town Tourism generated about 15% of its income itself and wanted to grow this to 25% in the near future so that it could invest more in the work it did. The tourism body also aims to increase international arrivals from around 1.2 million currently to 1.5 million.
Further, Duminy said Cape Town Tourism was looking at new markets that were willing to travel to Cape Town during the low season, had flight access and didn’t have visa or exchange rate limitations. “We have people travelling from the UK, US and Germany during our summer. They won’t travel here in their summer and why should they?”
According to Duminy one of the markets that has been identified is Halaal tourism. He said Cape Town’s strong Muslim culture as well as the mosques and fewer sunlight hours made it a good choice to experience Ramadan, for example. 
He said there was huge potential to grow tourism to Cape Town in new markets but that research needed to be done to market the destination properly to these. 
“Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. We say the weather is bad but it’s not worse than other markets. We need to look at it collectively to address the problem. It will take time but we need to start somewhere.”