South Africa’s national parks are poised for a surge in gay tourism now that a tourist operator has launched a series of tours designed to initiate gay visitors to the delights of the savannah.
While Cape Town is consistently voted one of the top five gay holiday destinations worldwide, Strider Expeditions says it aims to lure gay tourists out of the Mother City for a fuller African experience.
Although the international gay travel market accounts for more than 70-million arrivals worldwide, South Africa receives only 1% of international gay travellers, according to the South African Gay and Lesbian Travel Alliance.
”In South Africa, the gay community is not very well served,” says Ian Pollard, a former guide in the Kruger National Park and co-founder of Strider along with Briton Charlotte Currie. Gay people ”feel more accepted in some places than others”, he says.
Identifying accommodation in the countryside that welcomes gay clients was a first step to launching the service. Strider says he knows of lodges in the conservative rural heartland of the Free State that specifically cater for gay tourists, while others declare themselves ”gay friendly”.
The company also employs gay and lesbian tour guides who can help tailor packages to the specific needs of gay tourists, such as organising trips to see performances by Peter Dirk-Uys, a well-known gay satirist and former anti-apartheid activist.
The tours offered by the company take in Kruger National Park, parts of Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa’s Wild Coast, as well as the mandatory Cape Town/southern Garden Route coastal stretch.
Without being able to quantify it, Pollard is convinced the market for gay tourism is ”a huge, huge market” in South Africa, which last year became the first African country to legalise same-sex marriage.
In December, the Mail & Guardian Online reported that Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, which manages 68 lodges catering for eco-tourists heading to KwaZulu-Natal, had hired Vivienne Quann of Hot Salsa Media, a marketing company that specialises in the gay market, to transform its hotels internally and teach staff how to deal with gay customers.