» Indaba 2011: Was it good for you? This Tourism Week: Newsletter on-line commentary and discussion about tourism in South Africa

This Tourism Week: 19 May 2011

Is there anything to be read into the fact that the SADC pavilion appeared to be consistently the most busy at this year’s Indaba?

Yes, to answer my own question, I think there is.

My Indaba experience always begins on the Friday before the show – I often find the day-before conferences a highlight, and this year I wasn’t disappointed: I attended Cape Town Tourism’s Responsible Tourism in Cities conference, which attracted on-line participants from around the world, and it was my first experience of the mash up between real life and social media. And it was good to learn from Ron Mader (founder and editor of planeta.com) that South Africa is leading the way in Responsible Tourism (to find out why, watch this discussion).

Then, of course, on the Saturday of the show, the first day of official business, the first thing I like to do (if I haven’t got any immediate appointments), is to walk through the pavilions to get a feel for the event.

If you haven’t been to Indaba, let me quickly explain that it spans the Nkosi Albert Luthuli Conference Centre (also known as the ICC – the International Conference Centre), and the Durban Exhibition Centre (the DEC), as well as the road between the two – and there’s also a massive, fixed-frame tent which goes up behind the DEC.

The biggest change this year was to find that the Western Cape exhibitors had been taken out of the tent (previously their exclusive preserve) and put into the DEC – while the SADC and East African countries had been moved from the DEC to the tent.

This should have made the Western Cape people happy, seeing as how they always used to complain that nobody could find them on account of they were tucked away in the back yard like that.

But it wasn’t to be – nobody found them in the DEC, either. And I would argue that that was because nobody was there to find them: they were all looking for the other African countries.

I think this speaks volumes both about our product offering and about the state of tourism in South Africa.

Guys – we aren’t flavour of the month any more. And over the next few editions of This Tourism Week, I intend to explore why this is so.

But back to the Indaba.

After elbowing my way through the crowds in the SADC pavilion (the tent) I entered the relative calm of the DEC, where I visited the individual provinces without let or hindrance – mostly because there was almost nobody except exhibitors in the gangways. And it wasn’t much better in the ICC, where I found about two aisles worth of tour operators flanked by dozens of aisles worth of accommodation establishments.

And therein lies the rub: I’m beginning to think we’ve got too many beds and too few things to do in South Africa. And that may be the difference between South Africa and the other African countries: we offer you a place to sleep. They’re offering you a reason to sleep in their places.

And then finally, in this highly personal assessment of the Indaba: where were the buyers? The orange lanyards? (The colour of your lanyard identifies you as – yellow: a member of the media – blue: an exhibitor – black: a member of the organising team, etc.)

Where were the orange lanyards?

South African Tourism will tell you that they were there in their thousands, but I didn’t see them. And neither did the people I spoke to.

So what’s to be done? Are there fundamental flaws in the way the Indaba is organised? Or is the problem more deep rooted, and should South Africa’s tourism industry be asking itself ‘where to from here?’