Plea to lift state of disaster in attempt to boost battered tourism sector

Ending the national state of disaster will bring confidence and encouragement to tourists to visit SA.

It will go to great lengths to support rebuilding sectors of tourism and hospitality that had been devastated by Covid lockdown restrictions and the red-listing of South Africa by countries globally.

This is the belief of the hospitality industry’s union, Fedhasa, ahead of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address on Thursday.

Fedhasa calls on government to provide confidence to international tourists and encourage them to visit our shores.

The hospitality sector has largely borne the brunt of changing lockdown regulations in terms of business closures and job losses, despite putting in place stringent health and hygiene protocols.

It is our view, based on the
current profile of the pandemic in SA, that the centralisation of these extraordinary powers is no longer required
and that individual departments should once again be tasked with the role of providing an enabling environment
for businesses to flourish.

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In the case of tourism and hospitality, this includes improving the visibility and accessibility of South Africa
to our inbound international source markets through a proper eVisa system and additional budget for tourism
marketing, to restore this destination’s reputational issues caused by omicron at the end of 2021.

Temporary waivers should be considered for key markets and segments and a best-of-breed, world-class
fully automated eVisa should be instituted to replace the manual processing that currently takes place, otherwise
we will fall further behind our competitors. It is far too difficult for some of our key source markets to get visas.

The small window of opportunity to raise the profile of South Africa as a destination is closing, with Australia, South Africa’s largest longhaul competitor, announcing it would reopen borders soon.

• Anderson is the national chair of Fedhasa.