A teacher marking a survey of empowerment and transformation in South Africa’s tourism industry released on Monday would have noted ”adequate, but could do better”.
Letsema managing director Isaac Shongwe, who released the survey results in Sandton on Monday, said it was a positive sign that the tourism industry as a whole had embraced the survey. This ”demonstrates the commitment of industry players to empowerment issues even to the extent that they have been willing to expose themselves to an annual review”, he said.
Market research companies Letsema and Infonomics who conducted the survey — South Africa’s second — held face-to-face interviews with 30 industry leaders, and an online survey with certain small-, medium- and micro-enterprises (SMMEs).
Questions on ownership among industry leaders confirmed the difficulties faced in transferring the ownership of large tourism companies to black South Africans.
”Only six of the 22 businesses had black ownership greater than 25%,” the review summary noted.
A number of organisations said they were in the process of negotiating the entry of equity partners.
”More encouragingly, of the 24 organisations that had boards, 18 had at least one black board member and nine had more than 25% black board members.”
Turning to the related topic of affirmative procurement, identified as potentially one of the most important drivers of SMME growth in the tourism industry, 18 of the 30 organisations surveyed had a formal policy for this. Another six had informal policies.
There was concern at the lack of black-owned suppliers in many areas, that some black-owned suppliers were not competitive and lacked management expertise, that managers resisted radical changes in procurement, and that some large conglomerates promoted intra-group procurement, restricting supplier choice.
Other concerns were a lack of suppliers with the capacity to transport goods to remote areas, conflicts of interest between urban and rural black-owned companies and rural suppliers’ tendency to ”over-commercialise” their offerings.
The survey revealed that most firms performed well in the area of compliance with employment equity legislation, with those that did poorly in this area all being under the threshold-size set by the Employment Equity Act.
Many said a lack of skilled black personnel was a major constraint and that this was exacerbated by low staff turnover at senior levels. The lack of skills was particularly acute in the hotel industry, especially in the rural areas.
Another problem was the widespread ”poaching” of skilled black staff.
All but three of the 30 companies had formal skills development plans in place and internal and on-the-job training was commonplace.
However, training was no guarantee of success and some sense of vocation was important as the hotel and tour operator sectors of the industry were ”personality driven”.
Black ownership of established SMMEs involved in the industry showed that the level of black ownership was far lower, with 83% of respondents having less than 5% black ownership.
”This echoes the findings of earlier research [at the University of the Witwatersrand] which found that only 5%of SMMEs were black-owned,” the report noted.
The SMMEs were surveyed via an online questionnaire and were all members of the Federated Hospitality Association of SA, the Southern African Tourism Services Association or the Association of South African Travel Agents.
Eighteen of the 85 SMMEs which responded had entered into a partnership with a black-owned company; all but one of these was judged a success.
Twenty-three said they had submitted employment equity reports, 65 had appointed new staff in the past two years and 54 had specifically sought out black South Africans. Of these 42 had found suitable candidates and 19 said there were no suitably skilled black candidates.
SMMEs were also not generally aware of support programmes, especially government initiatives.
For the purposes of the survey ”black” denoted blacks, Indians and coloureds, said the Tourism Business Council’s Adrienne Harris. – Sapa