Aaron Nicodemus
Aids and KwaZulu-Natal hotels apparently don’t mix very well. Last week, participants in a workshop on Aids were nearly evicted from the Hluhluwe Zulu Nyala Protea Hotel in the north-east of the province when it was revealed that some were HIV-positive.
According to Aids activist Oziel Mdletshe, who attended the workshop, the hotel restricted the group’s access to other guests and served their meals separately. He called the experience “humiliating and degrading”.
The South African National NGO Coalition has called for a boycott of the hotel for its “discrimination on the basis of an individual’s HIV status”.
In another move that has infuriated Aids activists, Durban’s largest hotel chain will hike its rates by 50% to 300% during an international Aids conference next year.
An estimated 10 000 to 15 000 delegates from all over the world are expected to fill every available hotel room in the city next July. While most hotels have raised their rates for the conference, the huge price hikes by the Southern Sun Group have angered many in Durban’s tourism industry.
The group owns about 2 500 hotel rooms, about half of the hotel rooms in the Durban area, and many of them on the beachfront. Rooms that usually cost R650 per night at the Holiday Inn Garden Court will rise to R1 590 during the conference; other rooms that usually cost R395 a night will rise to R1 054. By comparison, hotels like the Hilton and the Royal will be raising their rates by about 10%.
“Nobody is saying that Southern Sun should charge rock-bottom rates,” says Peter Brokenshire, chief executive officer of Durban’s International Convention Centre. “This move will make us less competitive, and may hurt our chances of booking large conferences in the future.”
Southern Sun managing director Hector Pereira says he is willing to discuss a small price decrease with Durban officials “if it really is that emotional”.
As a direct result of Southern Sun’s price hike, Brokenshire says Southern Sun hotels will be blacklisted from any conference with under 2 500 delegates.
“It’s just plain greedy opportunism,” says Professor Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the group that helped Durban win the conference over European cities like Manchester and Barcelona. He says Southern Sun quoted substantially lower rates when a team from the International Aids Society visited Durban two years ago.