The problem, you see, is that tourism has tried to set itself apart from the rest of the economy, and we’ve been trying to market ourselves separately for years.

I’ve always said this. I’ve always argued that local tourism information offices should amalgamate with local chambers of commerce to achieve critical mass in their marketing. And that’s why I enjoyed interviewing Alan Winde, MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in the Western Cape, over the summer break.

He agrees.

I began by asking him about his controversial new plan for marketing the Province.

“Every year CTRU (Cape Town Routes Unlimited – the Provincial destination marketing organisation), Cape Town Tourism and the smaller tourism offices spend a combined one hundred million of tax money on marketing tourism in the Western Cape, and my research indicates that the private sector spends about R1 billion on top of that.

“Now obviously the Plettenberg Bay ratepayers aren’t interested in Laingsburg or Saldanha Bay – they’re interested in Plettenberg Bay, and rightfully so. But surely we should all be sitting around a table and saying, how much of that combined 1.1 billion should be going into a big pot for an overall strategy that will take our 10 million visitors in the Western Cape to 20 million over the next 10 years?

“And then we need to start asking questions like which foreign visitors do we want? Are we going to spend our money in China for example – where they can’t get visas for South Africa. Or are we going to go into the UAE and Saudi Arabia, since Cape Town has the perfect space for tourism from there? We have the mosques, we have the halal food, we understand their culture to a certain extent, and although we don’t get many tourists out of that region, they have the highest per capita spend in the world, and they do travel a lot (at 50 degrees in summer, you want to get out of there!).

“South African Tourism is not interested in the provinces – it’s interested in Brand South Africa, and getting first time visitors here; after they arrive, it’s up to us. So how do we handle those visitors, how do we build a database, and how do we get them to return?” he said.

But – and this is where I’d criticise the communications process – what I and many others failed to understand when the plan for marketing the Province was circulated was that there’s a bigger picture in the making.

In short, Alan Winde believes that we have no vision for the Province, and that you can’t plan or develop strategies without a vision – and to address this problem he’s created a programme called ‘Future Cape.’

“What Future Cape is suppose to do is to understand what the brand is, and to build the brand. Everybody gets bogged down on logos and names – but they’re the brand identity, and not the brand: we need to understand the brand, what we want the brand to be in 30 years time, and how we’re moving towards that.

“I want to change where tourism fits into the economy of the Western Cape, and the role that it plays by interlink it with other sectors so that they can act and react together.

“That’s why we’ve got to educate people in the right way. Right now, 60% of our kids don’t make it to matric. In 30 years time, we can’t be growing the economy with that kind of outcome.

“At the moment we’ve got an economic development department – an internal department – and outside of the department we’ve got WESGRO (for trade and industry), CTRU (for tourism), and 16 SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles – including the Cape Film Commission, the Fashion Council, three textile SPVs, a furniture initiative, one that does arts and entertainment, Cape Mic that does music, and so on) that all get a couple of hundred grand a year to promote their industry.

“These guys are the implementing agents whose job it is to grow the economy on behalf of the department.

“So the first question I asked was why we have so many people in the department doing the same work that these Section 21 companies are doing.

“If we’re going to deliver on the Future Cape vision, we have to begin with a much more dynamic, much more focused development agency that incorporates the key elements. A lot of these agencies don’t talk to each other, and I really want them to start operating under a single vision and start working together.

“So the problem statement was: I spend R240 million on Economic Development every year and I’m not happy with the results.

“I’ve got to drop our rate of unemployment, and I’ve got to grow our economy.

“There’s some excellence that appears in each of these entities, but there’s also a lot of deadwood. How do we get together a more cost-effective agency – because, remember, each one of these has a board, a CEO, an administration. It doesn’t make sense – it’s wasting our money. So I want to narrow this down.

“What must government do as far as the economy is concerned? The department’s job is to gather intelligence, to host the data – but are we a rudder? Are we steering the economy in the right direction, are we making, as government, the right choices? Are we educating in the right direction? Are we addressing aspects of health that are affecting the economy?” (Here he made the point that, although drugs and alcohol are major problems in the Western Cape, the rehabilitation of addicts is being left almost exclusively to social workers. “We should,” he said, “be saying to the universities: this is where we need more specialists, this is the direction in which you need to be educating.”)

“While we want to create growth and implement some of our ideas, we believe that the private sector is the delivery agent. The economy is driven, managed and created by the private sector – it’s not created by government, but government does have a role to play. We have to make sure we’re creating the skills, we’ve got to give the leadership as far as the vision’s concerned, and then we’ve got to have an agency that helps deliver on it.

“So how do we create a platform for business to do better?

“It’s still early days; on the 18th and 19th of this month, we start to have our first meetings of the mandating committee, which is made up of specialties from around the province and around the world who will help us decide the direction we’re going, what we need to have in this agency, and what we can deliver on.

“We need to ask what role exports and imports are going to play, what role does tourism play, what role does film play – how do they talk to each other, and therefore what the organisation should look like.”

I asked him if he would agree that tourism is a problem for itself because it’s set itself apart from the economy?

“Yes, and I want to change that. Since the start of the new South Africa tourism has been seen as the quick win – which is fine. But tourism is 11% of our GDP. It should BE our economy. Why are we talking about ‘the economy and tourism?’ It IS the economy, it’s a part of our economy, it’s a major sector. 70% of our economy is made up of finance and services – tourism fits into services. It forms 11% of our GDP, so it should take up 11% of the column centimeters in our business newspapers – but it gets excluded because it’s seen as separate, it’s seen as different. ‘Tourism is not part of business, it’s something that’s frilly on the side’.”

Is that tourism’s fault, or is it because of the bigger picture?

“I think it’s because they’re separated, they’re not seen as one – but I think tourism must demand its slice of the cake.

“Tourism is a major role player in our economy, and tourism must demand that it’s recognised as such.

“When you talk about tourism it’s not seen in the same light as mining, the steel industry, the telecoms industry, the construction industry. I think that the problem here is that in construction, for example, the big conglomerates all pull together. Who are the big tourism guys? A couple of big hotel groups, perhaps, but tourism is predominantly made up of SMMEs. But that’s where jobs are created! The SMMEs need to come together and say we ARE this industry. We make up tourism. We – a whole lot of little players – make up that 11%.

“What are we doing to get that recognition?”

What, indeed?

As a supplier of services to the tourism industry, may I suggest a few things?

  • Start managing the press properly so that it gets the idea that tourism is significant business – even if it’s not made up of big businesses. I bought three weekly papers this week. Out of 12 articles in the travel section of the Sunday Times, only one touched on local tourism (it was a travel article, actually, not about the business of tourism) – although out of 13 display ads in the same supplement, 4 offered local destination packages, and 2 offered a mix of local and foreign. The other 7 offered only foreign packages. And in the business section of the same paper, not a single article on tourism – unless you count the one about traveling overseas now because the rand is favourable. Similarly, Rapport’s ‘Sake 24’ had no articles on tourism – not one. But one of our local weeklies, the George Herald, lead with ‘Tourist Season one of the liveliest ever’ on the front page.
  • Start talking to local, provincial and national chambers and get tourism recognised, once and for all, for its value as a business sector;
  • Introduce legislation to encourage the integration of business and tourism organisations at local level;
  • Incorporate tourism as an integral part of business education. Is tourism included in business studies in schools? Colleges? Universities? Or is it only offered to the select few who are actually studying it as a major?
  • Legislate for local authorities and their tourism offices to share a single brand identity, and to share that identity (free of charge, but with restrictions on how it should appear when it’s used) with the private sector. At the moment in Knysna, where I live, I struggle to identify with the town because tourism has one brand identity, and the municipality has another. What’s with that? As a local business, I should be using the Knysna logo as often as I can, but I’m not – and nobody is – because (a) no one’s encouraging me to do so (in many towns, such a request might even be refused), and (b) if they were encouraging me to use the logo, which one would they want me to use? (And, no. I’m not going to use both. But yes, I would consider using both a Knysna and a Western Cape logo. And don’t try and integrate them. That would be death: cf. ‘Cape Town Routes Unlimited’ – who’s bright idea was it to market the entire province by calling it Cape Town?).