A LOCAL PERSPECTIVE
South Africa’s post-Covid tourism recovery The South African government needs to ease its visa entry requirements and be more welcoming of all travellers, particularly those looking for longer workation stays, if it wants to regain tourism’s place as a key driver of economic growth.
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ocial media marketing campaigns that educate domestic and foreign travellers need to be prioritised alongside the vaccination of frontline tourism workers and industry transformation to ensure that we weather the storm, writes Jabulani Debedu, senior consultant at BDO South Africa. South Africa’s tourism sector is an important driver of economic growth and has immense potential to kickstart our economic recovery. Yet, even though the sector contributed 8.6 per cent to our GDP (R430-billion) and supported 1.5 million direct jobs prior to the pandemic, it was barely mentioned in the
14 Business Events Africa April 2021
State of the Nation address (SONA) and Budget Speech. After being a priority economic sector for the last decade, this omission reveals that tourism has lost its place in the pecking order of government’s priority sectors and projects. The government seems to have pinned its hopes on the private sector solving this problem. Frontline tourism workers prioritised Internationally benchmarked hygiene, health and safety protocols will be prerequisites to give the travel market confidence to travel again. While tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane
indicated that frontline tourism workers would be prioritised during phase two of our vaccine rollout, our national vaccine rollout needs to be on par with vaccination rollouts in our tourist source markets, as even vaccinated travellers will not travel to countries that have only vaccinated a small percentage of its population or do not yet have herd immunity. Welcome all travellers Government should make South Africa more (not less) accessible to tourists and business travellers, instead of restricting who we allow into the country via stringent visa requirements. Other www.businesseventsafrica.com
