This Tourism Week 22 April 2010

So by now you’ll no doubt have seen the article in Southern African Tourism Update On Line – Garden Route MATCH Ville abandoned – and you’ll have seen this one on eTurbo News, too: Blow for hotels, B&Bs. World Cup South Africa – where are the tourists?

And I wonder: are you surprised by any of this?

I’m not. And I’m not happy. But…

“MATCH has confirmed that it has abandoned MATCH Ville along the Garden Route after poor response from international operators,” said Tourism Update.

“This comes after complaints from property owners in the area of their room inventory being dumped by MATCH after receiving confirmed bookings for the period.”

First – but just as an aside – have you ever actually tried booking anything with MATCH? I went to the FIFA site,  and to the MATCH site – but I couldn’t find a thing. Not even a mention of where I should go.

So about those promises that MATCH would market the Garden Route MATCH Ville? Do you think they did? I don’t, either – but I wanted to be sure it wasn’t just me, so I mailed a few questions to a few folks, and Shaun van Eyck, CEO of Knysna Tourism, was quick to mail back. “Call me,” he said. “I have some input.”

And boy, did he have a thing or two to say.

“They (MATCH) came into the region and asked us to back them, and we (Knysna Tourism) decided to encourage people to sign with them,” he said. “We went into the process committed to the idea of MATCH Ville because of their early promises.

“They spoke about the area being filled up with visitors.

“But we picked up that things weren’t going too well when the Knysna Accommodation Association raised the alarm. In January they told us they were getting direct enquiries, but that nothing was coming from MATCH – although much of their inventory was tied up with them.

“I then spoke to Vivienne Bervoets (Senior Accommodation Manager for the 2010 FIFA World Cup), and she agreed to release the B&B and guest house inventory on the understanding that those properties would remain on the MATCH web site.

“I now understand that they were kept there – as she said they would – but if you clicked on any of them, you got a message saying ‘no stock available’ – so it looks like they‘re sold out.

“As far as the principle of MATCH Ville is concerned, I’ve never had a problem with it, but as far as I’m concerned, MATCH made no attempts to promote it. And what they have done seems to go against the channel of sales – the flow of how the consumer makes his or her reservations.

“I don’t think MATCH made a sincere effort to market the Garden Route to overseas agents, so as far as anyone knew, there was no accommodation available in this region.”

In a blind test, Knysna Tourism phoned twelve different MATCH-appointed agents in Europe, but, said Mr. van Eyck, “Not one of them knew that there even was a Garden Route MATCH Ville.

“In all cases – and this was about eight weeks ago – they were encouraging us to go to Cape Town, Durban, or Gauteng, and only one said we could go to PE – but they stressed that even that was ‘a little out of the way’.”

“As far as we’re concerned, we believe that MATCH never even tried to market MATCH Ville, and so we’re now appealing to bodies like Cape Town Routes Unlimited to try and spread people (from overseas) into the Garden Route,” he said.

Like Mossel Bay, which probably read the signs first when it changed its marketing thrust earlier this year, and began concentrating on the domestic market (full disclosure: I’m Mossel Bay Tourism’s communications consultant), Knysna has now begun looking to South Africans for its wintertime trade during 2010.

“We’ve now realised that the major opportunity from the World Cup will be the media coverage we’ll get – and this was confirmed when I spoke to my colleague in the town that hosted the French team during Germany’s World Cup in 2006.

“He said that although their town (which, by the way, is Aerzen bei Hameln) is just 40 km from Hanover, they saw almost none of the fans – but they did get excellent exposure from having all the media there.”

Still, Knysna was going to get its domestic visitors anyway. As one accommodation provider said: “We never signed all our rooms to MATCH, because we kept 30% back for the Knysna Oyster Festival.” (Please remember this point as you continue to read.)

But not everyone in the Garden Route did sign to MATCH. Dermot Molloy of Plett’s 5-roomed Anlin Beach House said that he’d been sceptical from the outset.

“One had heard of the poor experience of participants in Germany in 2006,” he said.

Even though – or perhaps because – he and his wife, Fran, hadn’t signed, they have, he said, “had enquiries dribbling in (if you’ll pardon the pun) from World Cup supporters.

“I guess out of the 300 bed nights we have available between June the 11th and July the 12th, we’ve probably sold about 50 to fans, and every day we’re getting one or two enquiries – and our figures are already better than for June and July last year.”

He said, though, that the supporters would be harder work than their regular clientele – although he stressed that he wasn’t complaining.  “But they do want to spend just one night here – and, being in a holiday town, we’re used to guests staying three or four nights.”

And therein might lie the rub – everyone I spoke to said that MATCH had insisted all along on four or five night bookings.

So the question has to arise: who is this animal, ‘The Supporter.’

I’ll tell you: he (yes, he) is single – at least for the duration of the event – aged between 25 and 32, and he’ll be coming here with his pals, looking to see some of the games. And, when they’re over, to get drunk, get laid, and generally have a party.

And when he books his ticket, he’s not gonna be even slightly interested in our wonderful animals, or our beautiful scenery – although he might think of checking them out once he gets here.

And the tourism industry needs to understand this. As Ashley Wentworth of Tsitsikamma’s Treetop Canopy Tours said: “We believe that the knock-on effect of not having a MATCH Ville in the Garden Route will be enormous, but there’s no way of measuring that.

“So we’ve stuck with our aggressive domestic marketing campaign (a pay-for-three-and-one-goes-free affair – effectively a 25% discount for families), because we’ve always been sceptical about the arrival of the internationals – who may or may not come our way in their free time between games.”

Trouble is, none of us stopped to ask these questions when we started out on our road to football perdition back on the day when Sepp Blatter pulled that card out of that envelope.

Now, because I wasn’t sure of myself on this (you can’t find anything about the average fan on the net), I decided to ask the opinion of the CEO of SATSA, Michael Tatalias.

“I think we may have been lead astray in the broader process by promises of millions of visitors,” he said. “But you have to remember who it was that was making those promises – because it certainly wasn’t the tourism industry.”

He said that he’d participated in a desk-top exercise some time ago that was aimed at predicting how many fans we might see. “You could work it out by knowing how many flights were coming into the country – and that the airlines were never going to put any extra seats onto the route.”

Their answer? 220,000 – about the number that’s now being bandied about. (And yes, that’s down from 450,000 a few weeks ago. But 450,000 – by whose reckoning. And did you ever really believe them?)

But Michael (I love the man’s passion, and respect his knowledge and insight – and no, I’m not his publicist) had a lot more to say about the event, and the Garden Route’s MATCH Ville.

“The MATCH Ville concept was a good one,” he said. “In the days before the sub-prime crisis.

“When MATCH first came here, the world was booming, and there was every indication that the demand for tickets was going to be huge.

“They looked at places where people could stay, and how they could get around, and at that time our air infrastructure far exceeded our bed infrastructure, and so the minister of tourism convinced them to sign the B&Bs and guest houses – although this was something they’d never done before.

“Everyone thought, then, that the situation would be the same as it had in France, when the fans stayed in Paris and took coaches to the games in places like Nice.”

So under those circumstances, you might have been able to sell packages with long periods of accommodation in the Garden Route – or places like Mauritius – followed by short, sharp trips to the host cities for the games.

But would the fans have wanted that?

“Their primary need is soccer, and they’re not here to do us any favours,” said Michael.

“They want to be assured of rooms – and they want hotel rooms; they want to sleep in the town where they’re going to watch the game the next day; and they want to be able to go to the fan zones after their games, so that they can watch the next game with their friends.

“And if they are going to go on excursions, it’s going to be more like 4-hour city tours than 4-day trips into the bush,” he said.

“In the cold light of economic reality, we now know that people lack faith in their ability to hang onto their jobs, so they’re not travelling in the numbers that they were before the crisis.

“This means, now, that we’re back in a situation where we have enough room stock – and people are going back to what they wanted in the first place: hotels in the towns where they’re watching the games.

“So most MATCH Villes have either shrunk in size, or they’re not being used at all.

“It’s an across-the-board process, and a logistical one, and it’s not just the Garden Route that’s been affected,” he said.

Still, he thinks that the World Cup will provide one unique opportunity which you might not have thought about: “This year will be the only time when the whole family has its holidays all at once – all the schools, and all the universities, everyone.

“And places like the Garden Route, and Namibia and Botswana are driving (rather than fly-in) destinations for South Africans. So I think you’re going to see house full signs all over the place, with the beds filled by South Africans.

“At the same time, there will be opportunities for doing business with the foreigners.

“The fans are very connected, savvy, sharp, and under 50 – and Europeans especially rely heavily on their mobile phones and internet for their information. So if you put your discretionary spend into advertising specials on web and mobile sites, I expect you’ll pick up some business from them – once they’re here, in the country.”

And there you have it – it’s not, as I would like to have thought when I started out, a simple question of MATCH didn’t do its job. It’s a whole lot muddier than that.

And we may still be able to snatch a victory by going back to our basics after all.

Remember what we learned in Tourism Economics 101?

For a tourism economy to be successful, it must get 70% of its tourists from its domestic market – and 30% from its foreign market (but, yes, I still think MATCH could’ve performed a whole hell of a lot better…)