Visitors to the Western Cape may be on the increase but is it equipped to cope with the rush? asks Lynda Loxton
THE Western Cape tourism sector has finally taken off — and run straight into a wall of infrastructural bottlenecks because of low investment that could be its undoing.
This was the warning from local development group Wesgro, and the Cape of Good Hope Bank in their latest Western Cape Economic Monitor published in time for the Wesgro annual general meeting.
“After years of speculation and unfulfilled expectations, the Western Cape tourism sector is now in its take-off phase,”the monitor
As highlighted by the growing inability of the airline and hotel industries to cope with the boom in tourism in the Western Cape, “we are now reaping the harvest”of years of under- investment in new hotel accommodation.
This can largely be blamed on the fact that hotel occupancies have been low, even at peak times, and only a few hoteliers had the foresight to invest in long-term plans for new hotels. It will take two to three years to build the kind of three- and five-star hotels needed to cope with demand.
Other bottlenecks that have developed include transport, the handling of mail and freight, advance booking for sports and entertainment, the handling of foreign exchange by bank branches, the supply of world-class tour buses and the capacity of restaurants.
“These bottlenecks may be manageable during the mass tourism season, when everyone expects long queues and occasional mishaps,”the monitor reported.
“They are less excusable when occurring at international conferences or business-related tourist activities.”
Cape Town’s Olympic bid could go a long way towards galvanising the tourism industry into dealing with these bottlenecks and the monitor said “this very side-effect of the bid process has in the past been the main motivation underlying the bid of some of the “unsuccessful’ countries.”
The whole process should, however, be accompanied by an equal attention to improving the quality, not just the quantity, of tourism services.
If not, the monitor warned, the Western Cape could end up serving the same shoddy, rip-off service offered by some countries in Latin America, Southern Europe, and North Africa.
“The answer … may seem easy, but effective control is usually far more difficult. Private patrolling, more training, better quality control, more incisive management development, greater attention to comparative standards — we know what must be done, but are we taking sufficient action?”