The inbound tourism industry needs to price out-of-season products lower, and capitalise on secondary tourism destinations and attractions to attract more visitors to the country.
This was the advice from a panel of South African and German tourism stakeholders, who participated in the SA Tourism round-table discussion at ITB Berlin on March 6.
Price was always an issue, with the challenge of high inflation and exchange rates, but SA needed to be careful about charging overly-high rates and pricing itself out of the market, said a panellist.
There has been a slowdown in accommodation growth in SA, with forward bookings seeing a decline across the first half of 2019.
The problem that SA faced, said David Frost, board member of SA Tourism and Satsa CEO, is that in a free market, each player in the tourism value chain sets their own prices, and this cannot be controlled by SA Tourism or any other governing tourism body. “This has contributed to the slowdown in growth,” he said.
CEO of SA Tourism, Sisa Ntshona, echoed this concern, adding that if various players in the industry continued on this high-pricing trajectory, they could go out of business.
Travellers often made decisions based on pricing of products, so it was important to look at off-season pricing, continued Ntshona. Understanding what the international market wants, the evolution of travellers’ needs and priorities, and communicating this ‘data’ to the SA tourism market is one of the roles of SA Tourism.
Lower off-season rates would grow arrival numbers and the same goes for secondary destinations and attractions that haven’t been largely marketed, or that tourists may not know about.
Reducing prices of accommodation and tours in lesser-known locations (such as the variety of untapped destinations in KwaZulu Natal) during periods where more major destinations may be out of season (such as the Western Cape), has the potential to draw tourists to other areas of the country, retaining tourism numbers and spend.
Driving tourism to ‘hidden gems’, like the restaurant Wolfgat in Paternoster, which recently won the best ‘off map destination’ and ‘restaurant of the year’ accolades at the Restaurant Of The Year awards held on February 18 in Paris, would help achieve better tourism spread, said Ntshona.
“There are many secondary destinations that people are missing out on,” said Frost. “What we need to do collectively is engage in a market mapping system, making it easier to find [tourism] products.”
