ANALYSIS
Tim Cohe
South Africa may have messed up many parts of its economy, but somehow the tourism industry has escaped the destruction and it ranks extremely well internationally.
There is an enormous number of foreigners. That’s writer and former Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry on the subject of tourism, about which he has written several very funny books. In one, Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need, he makes the point that the human race is far too stupid to be deterred from tourism by a mere several million years of bad experiences and today we’re travelling in larger numbers than ever.
“We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at
home, there’s a part of us that wants — that needs — to see new vistas, take
new tours, obtain new travellers’ checks, buy souvenirs, order new entrées,
introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for
‘transfusion’ and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to
French-kiss our doormats when we finally get home,” he writes.
Despite Barry’s weirdly accurate warnings and the enormous
expense and discomfort of travelling, I do love it — as do so many people
around the world. The curious thing Is I’m not exactly sure why. Relaxation,
learning and exploration are part of it. There is also the sheer thrill of
getting away from the ordinariness of your life, even when your life is not at
all ordinary. One reason I enjoy foreign travel — and local travel for that matter — is that
you understand, once again, how ignorant you are.
The growth in the travel industry is extraordinary. Of
course, it got smashed during the Covid years, but the global industry is now
just above its pre-2020 numbers. Excluding this event, the travel industry has
more or less doubled over the past decade. The International Air Transport
Association has a specific measure called “revenue passenger kilometres” (RPK)
to measure the total distance travelled by passengers on aeroplanes. In 2014,
the global RPK was 500 billion per month, today it is about 900 billion, of
which about 60% is constituted by international travel.
For developing countries, tourism is an invaluable industry,
unless you run into a global pandemic. Generally speaking, the economic utility
of foreign tourism from the point of view of the host country is that you are
essentially exporting a service, except that your customers come to you to buy
that service in your country. South Africa may have messed up many parts of its
economy, but somehow the tourism industry has escaped the destruction and ranks
extremely well internationally.
On Tuesday, the World Economic Forum released its Travel
& Tourism Development Index for 2024 and the report is very positive about
SA’s tourism industry and its bounce-back from Covid, despite being only
cautiously optimistic about the state of the global industry.
I love these reports because they try to provide something
like a global benchmark, but of course, they have weaknesses. It’s very
difficult to aggregate something like tourism because people travel for such
different reasons and have enormously different requirements. For some, just to
take one example, value-for-money is an absolute necessity (like me!); for
others, it’s the cultural experience, and so on.
But even with these problems of aggregation, SA shines, and
my question is: Why? It’s not as though SA is shooting the lights out: its
current rank is 55 out of 119 countries measured. But it’s in the same league
as Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt — all great tourist destinations. It’s head and
shoulders above all other sub-Saharan countries except Mauritius. As you might
expect, SA tracks very well on the “value-for-money” rating — as one of our
British friends likes to tease, “We laugh at your currency…” — and very poorly
on the “personal safety” score.
But importantly, this is one measurement where SA is
actually improving, unlike so many other international rankings where we’ve
lost standing. The report notes that SA is up about seven places since last
year. The scoring is complex and includes everything from ICT readiness, health
and hygiene, to the state of industry and its environmental awareness.
Like a lot of these reports, when you throw everything into
the mix, Europe and North America tend to dominate because they tick so many
boxes; in this survey, the US scores highest, with Spain, Japan and a slew of
European countries at the top of the list. The report isn’t so much to rank
tourist destinations as to benchmark “factors and policies that enable the
sustainable and resilient development” of the sector, but it comes down to much
the same thing.
Overall, the findings indicate that international tourist
arrivals and the travel and tourism sector’s contribution to global GDP are
expected to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, but the report also notes
some broad problems, including a lack of capital investment, the constraining
effect of high inflation and — interestingly — extreme weather. But generally,
the industry is back.
So to return to the question of why SA seems to be
succeeding here. I suspect it’s a variety of factors — these things always are.
SA’s natural attractions are magnificent, of course: varied geography, fabulous
wildlife, dramatic coastlines and you can add great hotels, quirky art towns,
cool culture, etc. SA also has some additional advantages: a contra-climate to
that of the Northern Hemisphere, a European time zone, accessibility by
overnight flights and, oh yes, that weak currency.
But you know what I think has made a real difference? Good
government and private sector cooperation. This cooperation started long before
it was fashionable, ushering in the soccer World Cup in 2010. The collaboration
has held its ground, partly I think because the big ideologues in government
don’t care about tourism. You can see that in the fact that the tourism
minister, Patricia de Lille, is the only Cabinet member who is not a member of
the ANC.
Maybe it’s just that tourism is a very diverse but ultimately simple business. As Dave Barry would say, when you are leaving on a trip, take half the clothes and double the money.