SA Tourism has had to reduce its costs and one way to do this is to relook at its country office model.

This is according to Minister of Tourism, Derek Hanekom, who told Tourism Update at the Meetings Africa show that the operational budgets of SA Tourism’s country offices had been reduced because of the exchange rate.

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According to Hanekom, the only way that SA Tourism can compensate for the impact of the exchange rate is to get additional funds to market the country, or to reduce its costs elsewhere and to work more efficiently with the budget available. He added that, given that there wasn’t really additional money readily available, costs had had to be cut.

“Right now we are sitting in a situation where we are obliged as government to cut costs and reduce our expenditure and that’s being applied across the board,” said Hanekom.

“A country office is an expensive thing,” he said, adding that SA Tourism was looking at a hub model where more countries would be serviced out of one hub. For example, he said, Italy could be covered from France, where SA Tourism also has a country office. He said the department would also look at placing more people at embassies and looking at other ways to ensure SA Tourism had a presence, even if not by way of a country office.

The Minister stressed that the intention was not to dramatically reduce the number of country offices but to ensure that the country offices more effectively covered a set of countries. For example, he said, currently, not enough attention was given to Spain and Portugal.

According to the Minister, the department and SA Tourism have had to look at applying the money that is available as strategically as possible. For this reason, he said it was also reducing the number of people attending trade shows.

The process was under way to hire a new CEO for SA Tourism, said Hanekom.