Hey SA Tourism, Fix SA – then lure tourists

Tourism SA is right. Eskom and fixing potholes is not their job. Theirs is bringing people and their money into the country. What’s shortsighted is even if printing visit South Africa on a premier league shirt is going to work, it may not be the best time.

Picture this

There you are, sitting in London, gulping your pint while hurling obscenities at some Scouser’s mother as Harry Kane misses another shot. You’ve been a season ticket holder of Spurs for four seasons and you think to yourself, “I fancy a holiday. I feel like going somewhere but I don’t know where.”

After your seventh pint you squint at the sleeve of a player and think, “I should go to South Africa.” After getting home and telling the missus, you pack, you book your ticket and head for Mzanzi. Great! Well done, Tourism SA.

R1 billion well spent. However, when you arrive, your Uber bursts a tyre, your hotel can’t check you in for another two hours because the electricity is out and when you pass that time by walking down the street, you gotta avoid being robbed, begged at or, at the very least, accosted by several street vendors trying to sell the same wares.

Remember in 2005 when Benedict Cumberbatch was kidnapped and shoved into the boot of a car? Somehow I’m unconvinced that reading “visit South Africa” in White Hart Lane would have made the experience any more pleasant. Similarly, today, reading that Spurs’ new stadium can’t undo the bad press of anything that may befall a new crop of tourists in South Africa.

‘It’s all connected’

Eskom and fixing potholes may not be the job of Tourism SA but they certainly affect the work that it does. So too does local safety, poverty and economy. Marketing through the Premier League is a good and effective tourism strategy, especially considering how fans around the world will be paying to buy the shirt and, by extension, marketing South Africa.

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Over 45 million people follow them just across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If just 0.01% of those people come to South Africa and spend $5 000 (more than R87 000), we would have already recouped about 33% of the cost.

It’s not that far-fetched to see a healthy return on the investment on paper. If, however, a couple of those 4 500 people don’t have a great time and tell their buddies, it won’t matter how much PR Tourism SA does. This is the risk of any form of tourism, sure. It’s just that you don’t go all out in selling a product when the product isn’t ready for market and South Africa’s marketability is currently questionable.

Even the go-to jewel of South African tourism, Cape Town, is engaged with a serious homelessness issue. Second-in-command Durban, can’t be trusted to keep its beaches open and Johannesburg, well, let’s have them decide who they want as mayor first.

These may not be your issues to deal with, Tourism SA, but they will be the issues faced by the tourists you bring in and you need to understand that. Tourism brought in some R1.5 billion to Durban during the 2022 festive season, so a R1 billion, three-year deal to get international money in does seem feasible and, frankly, exciting.

I’m happy to back it, though Tourism SA must accept that its job goes beyond getting the people here. It’s also about making sure that the people they bring here are happy when they are here. Because if we’re paying R1 billion to send thousands of people back around the world to tell their friends and family about what a terrible time they had in South Africa, I’d much rather have a very large flag pole.

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