» THIS TOURISM WEEK Number 41 – Monday, 12 June 2006 This Tourism Week: Newsletter on-line commentary and discussion about tourism in South Africa

THIS TOURISM WEEK Number 41 – Monday, 12 June 2006 Stats 2005

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I’ve decided to step into a minefield this week: the Statistics minefield. To fortify myself I spent a few hours going through two publications which I picked up at this year’s Indaba: the ‘Indaba 2006 Fact Sheet: 2005 Tourism Arrivals’ and ‘Gearing Up To Be Globally Competitive: Tourism Growth Strategy 2005 – 2007’ – both published by South African Tourism. I began my reading by promising myself I wouldn’t think about the age of the stats, nor about the length of time it takes for them to reach the industry, nor about the special note on page 3 of the Tourism Arrivals brochure (“The full 2005 Annual Report will be available in early July. There was a delay in the report due to the late availability of the foreign tourist arrival statistics”). I thought I’d just dive in and see what happened. As long as you don’t unpack them, the stats make the state of tourism look pretty good. As an industry in South Africa, tourism comes off a stagnant base of about 1,000,000 foreign arrivals per year throughout the 70’s and the 80’s (which gives the lie to those people who’ve written to me to say that “there’s no need to transform tourism because we’re playing on a level field / we were all in the starting stalls together because there was no tourism industry before 1994.” Don’t laugh – I really did receive some of those). Between 1990 and 1998 there was “an initial period of short-term profit-taking followed by a period of investment growth and entry of foreign players.” This was the period immediately following Nelson Mandela’s release during which sanctions were lifted and when we held our first democratic elections and (oh, sweet memory!) we staged – and won – the Rugby World Cup. It was a heyday of rapid growth: between 1994 and 1998 tourism leaped forward at a rate of 11.8% p.a. before cooling down and growing at 6.2% a year between 2001 and 2005. And then total arrivals increased by 10.3% from 6,677,839 in 2004 to 7,368,742 in 2005. The magical seven million mark had been hit and exceeded and the politicians and the officials who spoke about it at the Indaba were ecstatic. But forgive me – the people who are running tourism businesses don’t feel quite the same: although all of them were saying that they were doing great business at the show, most of them were saying that their figures weren’t quite as rosy as the stats would have us believe. To understand this dichotomy, I began by looking for a definition of a tourist – which I found in the Tourism Growth Strategy (“any person travelling to a place other than that of his / her usual environment. The trip should consist of at least one overnight stay … and not be longer than one year”). And, helpfully, the booklet also explained that people travel primarily for leisure, business, religious and medical reasons. So – more than 7.3 million non-South Africans spent one night or more in South Africa last year. But where did they come from – and, equally importantly, why did they come here? Total arrivals from Africa and the Middle East grew 15.69% from 4,673,724 in 2004 to 5,407,216 in 2005; from Europe the number grew 1.68% from 1,287,057 in 2004 to 1,308,634 in 2005; and from the Americas it grew from 290,625 to 322,099 (statistically, a 10.83% increase). Asia and Australasia sent us 71 less tourists lat year – down 0.03% from 275,001 (which leaves you wondering what happened to that much-vaunted ‘preferred destination status’ which China conferred on us with much fanfare a year or two ago). Looking at those African figures a little more closely, I found that Lesotho provided us with 1,657,119 tourists in 2005 (up 12.66% from 2004); Swaziland, 909,966; Botswana, 794,705; Zimbabwe 773,991; Mozambique, 596,462 and Namibia 219,303. Nigeria sent us 28,995, Angola 27,801, Kenya 20,738 and Mauritius 13,921 people. And air arrivals from the rest of Africa amounted to 118,692. And what did all those people do here? Were they leisure, business, religious or medical tourists? Neither the Stats nor the Tourism Growth Strategy brochures could tell me. But lemme guess: our five top source markets for foreign arrivals to South Africa are Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique; most of the people who visit from those country’s spend two nights in South Africa (I got that from the Tourism Growth Strategy) – and South Africa is the economic powerhouse of the sub-region. Now – two nights is usually too short for a holiday and as far as I know South Africa hasn’t all that many places of pilgrimage. So those people must have come here to do business (for which read ‘shopping’) or for medical reasons, right? And how does that help the tourism industry? Such huge numbers of people do make a massive and undeniable difference to the country’s economy as a whole – but, as reader Allan Duff put it to me: “you can’t [lump] Kenyans coming to Gauteng to shop with Europeans coming to the Cape to live it up… Though I appreciate your Gautenger needs to know about the Kenyans.” The truth (and it’s not a politically correct truth, I’m afraid) is that the tourism industry as it’s represented at the Indaba can’t count on the millions from Africa to make any real difference to its bottom line. … Uncomfortable, I know, but it’s something the politicians and the officials need to recognise: at 1,308,634 our arrivals from Europe were less than 1.7% up on 2004. And that’s the figure that counts. … Have a Great Tourism Week! MARTIN HATCHUEL – BarefootWriter

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