Africa Travel Week

FacebookXLinkedInWhatsApp
COVID-19Videos on Demand

INTERVIEW: The South African Tourism Industry approaching 120 days of lockdown

Harold Goodwin
July 23, 2020
2 min read

Harold Goodwin, World Travel Market Responsible Tourism advisor interviews Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, Chief Executive Officer at the Tourism Business Council of South Africa and Gillian Saunders, Independent Tourism & Hospitality Advisor about the impact of COVID-19 in South Africa.

Harold, Tshifhiwa and Gillian discuss the current situation of the industry in lockdown, about the development of industry-wide protocols to ensure guest health and about what the agents and operators abroad can do to assist.

South Africa has closed its borders to international tourists, and domestic leisure travel is prohibited as the country prioritises the battle to contain and survive the COVID-19 pandemic, The tourism industry is closed down.

Tens of thousands of livelihoods are threatened and lost. In Africa, South Africa has been hit hardest by the pandemic.

Sisa Ntshona, chief executive officer of South Africa Tourism, is reported to have said: “I don’t foresee any international tourism happening within this calendar year.” He expects that it may take two to three years to return to 2019 levels of 10.2 million tourists that visited the southern African nation. Cape Town Tourism reports survey evidence: About 83% of businesses indicated that they would not survive longer than six months under the current lockdown conditions with 56% of businesses not having a recovery plan in place.”
Read more

The Tourism Business Council of South Africa has worked throughout the sector to develop and implement comprehensive health protocols to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

These protocols are effectively protecting the health of staff and business travellers. The industry is calling for interprovincial domestic tourism to be allowed out of lockdown arguing that without it, jobs will be permanently lost. “Without 90% of the market, of which approximately 60% travels across provincial borders, there will be no demand and businesses will not be able to trade, even at break-even levels,” reported Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, CEO of TBCSA.
Read more

Harold Goodwin

Harold Goodwin is WTM’s Responsible Tourism Advisor, he puts together the flagship Responsible Tourism programme at WTM London which attracts 2000 participants each year and the programmes run at WTM Africa, WTM Latin America and Arabian Travel Market. Harold has worked on 4 continents with local communities, their governments and the inbound and outbound tourism industry. He is Managing Director of the Responsible Tourism Partnership and chairs the panels of judges for the World Responsible Tourism Awards and the other Awards in the family, Africa, India and Ireland. Harold works with industry, local communities, governments, and conservationists and undertakes consultancy and evaluations for companies, NGOs, governments, and international organisations. He is also a Director of the Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is an Emeritus Professor, and Founder Director of the International Centre for Responsible Tourism promotes the principles of the Cape Town Declaration which he drafted.

View all posts

You may also like

COVID-19

Tourism: Seeing beyond COVID-19

In the face of imminent danger, the natural instinct to survive at all costs kicks in. Such is the global story of the COVID-19 pandemic as Gugu Sithole has discovered. Governments are preoccupied with how this runaway...

Gugu Sithole
COVID-19

South African tourism and COVID-19

We have no idea what normal will look like. Various versions of lockdown will be our reality until a vaccine for COVID-19 is found. Welcome to 2020 the year that everything changed for Di Brown. The reality dawns...

Di Brown
Newsletter