While South Africa has seen only 6.4% growth in arrivals from the UK over the past 10 years, the country still attracts a comparatively good share of travellers from the UK. However, newly announced regulations will hurt this market.
This is according to Nadine Rankin MD of AMG, a UK-based sales representation and tourism marketing agency.
Speaking at this year’s SATSA Conference in Stellenbosch on Friday, Rankin pointed out that while SA had experienced negligible growth in tourism from the UK over the past five years, in the context of the recession, this was “by no means a disaster”.
She said the UK had been harder hit by the recession than other European countries. She also pointed out that if the arrival figures from the UK to SA over the past few years were compared with the general outbound numbers from the UK, the numbers were comparable. “Everybody who relies on the UK as a tourist market suffered,” she said. “The recession was to blame; there is no two ways about it.”
Following the recession, travel from the UK to the US dropped by 33% compared with 2008 figures, said Rankin, and travel to Australia and Brazil was also down. However, she also pointed out that some destinations had seen growth in travel from the UK. These included Thailand and Mexico.
She said that, based on her research, 73% of UK tour operators were experiencing modest to strong growth in travel to SA. She said there was a lot of optimism about the country, particularly among specialist operators, who were experiencing greater growth than more general operators. According to Rankin, specialist operators are performing well because they are offering bespoke services. “They really understand South Africa and know the differences between the different provinces, lodges and experiences offered.”
However, she suggested more could be done to attract the UK market. “We need to make sure we have enough budget so that we don’t have to spread it too thinly amongst those key partners that we have and so that we can build more partnerships with more tour operators.” She said there were many tour operators in the UK selling SA. “If you are not working with these people and investing in marketing with them, they start to lose interest.” She added that the operators would start to look at other destinations.
Rankin urged the inbound trade to ensure it had representation in the UK and to invest in joint marketing. She also urged SA Tourism to ensure that its UK office returned to full capacity as soon as possible and to organise as many educational trips as possible for the UK trade to equip operators to sell SA.
Finally, she warned that new regulations were expected to negatively affect travel to SA from the UK. She said 64% of the UK tour operators she spoke to during her research were expecting the requirement for children under 18 to travel with an unabridged birth certificate to result in at least a 10% drop in travel to SA. “The family market is under threat. The sport market is under threat,” said Rankin, adding that these groups could go to Barbados or Sri Lanka instead. “The cancellations are already starting to come in.”
MICE operators also reported looking at other destinations because of the new regulations, as well as concerns around flight availability, said Rankin. She added that the withdrawal of SAA’s London to Cape Town route had come as a shock to the industry.