The Western Cape will launch a ‘water offset tool’ next month to enable visitors to offset their water consumption before they arrive by making donations to local water-saving initiatives.

Speaking at a briefing in Cape Town last week, Wesgro Chief Marketing Officer, Judy Lain, said: “We get quite a lot of visitors who don’t want to come here because they think it is socially irresponsible, because they are worried they are going to take water away from the locals.”

To address this, in April Western Cape Economic Opportunities MEC, Alan Winde, will launch a website that will give visitors the opportunity to be part of the solution by offsetting their water footprint through donations to NGOs driving water-saving initiatives. “We would like all tour operators to display this link on their websites,” Lain said.

She said the travel and tourism industry, led by SA Tourism, Satsa and Jamms (a strategic partnership between Cape Town Tourism, Fedhasa Cape, SAACI Western Cape and Satsa Western Cape), was going all out to drive home the message that Cape Town and the Western Cape were resilient and open for business. 

Lain said the industry had managed to pull together a single narrative that was helping to change the messaging internationally to focus on “resilience”, rather than the crisis. She said Cape Town and the Western Cape had become a benchmark on how a destination could deal with water scarcity.