A future-fit Cape Town Tourism is a refinement of Cape Town Tourism’s business plan with the core focus staying true to the 2020 vision of positioning Cape Town as one of the world’s top destinations in which to live, work, study, visit and invest in.

Cape Town Tourism and the City of Cape Town have jointly set the bold target of doubling the economic impact of tourism on the city by 2020, and to do so in a sustainable way that will ensure widespread economic benefit. In the light of the constraint global tourism economy, we will have to adopt a new way of doing business.

Strategic Objectives and Priorities

The vision for tourism in the city provides the focus and framework for seven strategic objectives for our work:

1. To enhance the national and international image and awareness of Cape Town as an outstanding place to live, visit, work, study and invest;
2. To optimise tourism volumes and yield for the city economy in a totally sustainable and responsible manner;
3. To establish good levels of tourism business all-year-round;
4. To optimise the distribution of tourism benefits within the city region and beyond;
5. To engage actively with the City’s tourism businesses to help them become highly competitive, embrace transformation and adopt responsible practices;
6. To engage Capetonians as proud ambassadors for their city;
7. To encourage action by CTT’s partner organisations in the city to develop Cape Town responsibly and ensure a safe, attractive and welcoming environment.

To fulfil these objectives, we have identified seven strategic priorities that are the focus of the business plan:

1. Cape Town 365 – generating high yield tourism all-year-round;
2. Developing and delivering an encompassing and engaging Cape Town brand;
3. Cape Town at large – unlocking local distinctiveness, unique visitor experiences and new tourism potential, and spreading the benefits of tourism as widely as possible across the city region and beyond Cape Town;
4. Strategic planning and leadership for tourism in Cape Town;
5. Industry engagement: improving the performance of Cape Town’s tourism businesses and maximising their involvement in Cape Town Tourism’s programmes;
6. Community engagement: getting citizens to “Live Cape Town: love Cape Town”;
7. Developing the business, to generate more commercial income for Cape Town Tourism to enable it to grow without relying on additional public sector funding.

Cape Town Tourism’s Programme Areas

Cape Town Tourism has four primary programme areas. The essence of the strategy for each of the four areas is as follows:

1. Marketing: to build and deliver the brand of Cape Town and attract a mix of market segments that together will create the tourism business that Cape Town requires – good, high yield, business all-year-round, with good geographical distribution across the city region and beyond.
2. Visitor services: to play a key longer term marketing role by maximising visitor satisfaction, in order to stimulate repeat visits and recommendations, and to maximise visitor spending in the city and stimulate widespread distribution of this spending.
3. Industry services: to engage the industry in a common effort to market the destination of Cape Town, through participation in CTT marketing projects and in industry-led marketing consortia, to promote specific areas, routes, themes and niche products; to provide support and advice to businesses to help them to maximise their profitability and investment in the quality of the products and services; and to engage businesses in local tourism business networks that will facilitate local partnerships and discussion of key issues.
4. Community engagement: to stimulate civic pride and encourage citizens to be brand ambassadors of Cape Town, through effective messaging at key existing events and through dedicated programmes like My Cape Town and Cape Town Sons and Daughters.

CTT will ensure that its work is undertaken on an integrated basis, maximising synergies between, for example, marketing and visitor services; business tourism and leisure tourism; visitor services and industry services. 

Key Principles for Cape Town Tourism’s Programmes

1. Remain future-fit by investing in research, trends and market analysis;
2. Focus on a limited number of activities that we can do well, but facilitate action by partners and members as well;
3. Target a small number of highly productive market segments, to maximise the impact of our budget in delivering additional business to Cape Town;
4. Responsible Tourism is our foundation;
5. Embrace citizens and visitors as our marketers and storytellers;
6. Maximise the lifetime value of customers of all types.

Focus Areas for 2010/2011

With our commitment to making Cape Town Tourism future-fit, our focus for the next year is on the following:

1. Brand Cape Town

Since 2004, Cape Town’s status as a host city of the World Cup has dominated our brand position and messages. With the World Cup having come and gone, we find ourselves in a brand vacuum. To be future-fit, Cape Town cannot continue to rely on natural beauty as our core identity. In a world seeking authenticity, experience, inspiration and innovation, we must unlock the stories of our people, their creativity, culture, heritage and achievements. Cape Town Tourism has been mandated by the City of Cape Town to lead a brand positioning process for the destination, in partnership with key stakeholders, taking into consideration all the aspects that make our city unique. The new brand positioning will be a comprehensive city brand – encompassing citizens, tourism, business and academia. It is not about a clever logo or advertising campaign, but about finding a believable, shared destination identity that can frame Cape Town’s complexity and lead us into the future.

2. The Web, eMarketing and Technology

With more than a billion people now having access to the internet, online activity has become habitual. Across the board we are seeing how travellers are relying more on the opinions of friends and fellow consumers when planning and booking a holiday. For the past three years, travel has been the best-selling online commodity internationally. Over 70% of both domestic and international travellers cite the internet as their primary source of information about destinations, hotels and attractions prior to and during their travels. Forty-eight percent of tourists are making their travel bookings online, often with far less planning or lead time than was the norm.

Cape Town Tourism is committed to playing a leadership role in ensuring that our tourism industry embraces technology. We will continue to invest significantly in this area, building on the solid foundation laid in the run-up to the World Cup and keeping up with global trends. A radical overhaul of Cape Town Tourism’s systems and technology is currently underway, with many key projects near completion. This includes a new centralised online booking system called VMMS that will enable much enhanced data management and online real-time bookability, and the sophisticated financial management software programme Syspro This will eliminate duplication, streamline operational processes and increase efficiency.

3. New Markets

Cape Town’s World Cup visitors were mainly from traditional key source markets such as the UK and USA, Germany and the Netherlands, but there were significant inflows from new markets, particularly South America and the Far East. Growth is, according to the ITB World Travel Trends Report for 2010/11, being driven by emerging markets such as Asia and South America, while mature markets are seeing low growth.

World travel in 2011 is predicted to grow by 3% to 4%, with most confidence in Asia and South America. China and India are the economic powerhouses of the future and Asia is expected to see a double-digit outbound growth in 2011. Around 46-million Chinese travelled abroad last year, as did over 4-million Indians. As nations grow, so does their exposure and disposable income, leading to trips farther afield.

There is a significant opportunity in these new markets for Cape Town, especially during our off-peak winter months. We will work with our partners in South African Tourism to understand how new travel behaviour will impact on us and we will adjust our marketing, communication and offerings to meet the needs of our new and existing customers. While a large part of our focus will remain on our traditional key source markets, we are shifting some of our attention to the key new source markets, with the emphasis on media and trade relations in these regions.

4. Domestic Tourism

Cape Town Tourism’s Easter and winter campaigns are aimed at the domestic market, and will go live in time for Easter promoting great winter deals through a central website portal on http://www.capetown.travel.

Staying ahead in travel and tourism today requires that we are agile, value-driven and multi-focused. Our domestic market is increasingly important to us and winter is the perfect time to roll out the red carpet on affordability for our customers, many of them right on our doorstep.

5. Events

Events are important platforms for destination marketing and branding, and are effective catalysts to counter seasonality. In partnership with the City of Cape Town, Cape Town Tourism is developing an events strategy for Cape Town that looks at a more strategic relationship with existing signature events, and at establishing or attracting key events within our off-peak season. Our focus will be on events that reinforce Cape Town’s brand positioning and contribute to the sustainable and equitable growth of our tourism industry.

6. Responsible Tourism

Sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have. With the world heading towards massive overcapacity and shrinking demand in traditional markets, destinations and businesses have no choice but to ensure sustainable tourism practices cascade throughout their operations and offerings.

Climate change is not only directly affecting the cost of aviation, but it is also speaking to people’s moral values. More and more people will question the acceptability of flying long haul for recreational or leisure purposes. Cape Town as a long-haul destination must be able to answer these tough questions and promote sustainable local experiences to offset long-haul travel. It is predicted that individual carbon budgets could be in the pipeline. We must be ready for dramatic change in this arena.

Cape Town is proud to be taking the lead in the Responsible Tourism journey and Cape Town Tourism is a proud partner in the City of Cape Town’s Responsible Tourism strategy and campaigns.

7. Strategic Campaigns

Cape Town Tourism supports two major campaigns that have the potential to position Cape Town on the world stage for many years to come:

• Cape Town’s bid to be World Design Capital 2014
  Cape Town’s bid proposal has been submitted to the judging body the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. We will hear in June if we have been shortlisted and in October if our bid has been successful.
  The bid to be World Design Capital will give a significant injection and turn the world’s design eyes on our city – perfect timing to display the significant urban regeneration projects coming to our city within the next three years.
• Voting for Table Mountain to be one of the New7Wonders of Nature
  Table Mountain has been shortlisted as one of the potential New7Wonders of Nature. We are in the bottom half of the 28 finalists and reports that we received from the organisers are that up to 95% of votes for Table Mountain have been from overseas. South Africans need to start voting in droves and we need to start doing it now, every day. Cape Town Tourism has partnered with the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company on this campaign with the focus on PR, awareness and communications.

8. Product development and packaging

We have amazing tourism products available in Cape Town but we need to package them better so that they appeal to the changing needs of our customers. We need to understand how new travel behaviour will impact on us and we must adjust our marketing, communication and offerings to meet the needs of our customers. It is about the customer, not the destination. Once we get this, we can influence their travel choices. There is a need to diversify our product offering, which is in danger of becoming stale.

9. Commercialisation

Cape Town Tourism is committed to forging an effective partnership with the City of Cape Town in order to optimise the return on the city’s grant funding investment. At the same time, we are committed to marketing Cape Town in partnership with the industry.

We are implementing plans to balance our reliance on public funding with increased self-generated income. Forging partnerships with industry and the private sector to do collaborative marketing is a key focus area. Commercial initiatives being developed by Cape Town Tourism include a real-time bookable website, improved retail strategy, the Industry Joint Marketing Partnership Programme, the extensive revision of our current membership programme to ensure relevance to a wider range of businesses, and a city card for visitors, locals and members linked to the City of Cape Town’s new public transport platform. We are also implementing a new point-of-sale system across our network of Visitor Information Centres as part of our new retail and commercial strategy

A future-fit Cape Town Tourism

Over the last few months we have looked critically at every aspect of our business and what needs to change in order for Cape Town Tourism to deliver the tourism vision within an ever-changing global environment.

It has become apparent that there is a need to eliminate some of the duplication that has been the legacy of past structures. In setting up the unified Cape Town Tourism in 2004, we absorbed older tourism models and organisational structures that are now irrelevant and inefficient. The time has come to future-fit Cape Town Tourism by streamlining organisational processes and systems and significantly improving efficiencies and productivity.

The following interventions are being made to ensure a more sustainable and relevant future for us as a leading destination marketing, industry and visitor services organisation:

1. A move away from a decentralised administration and area-management model to a centralised model to improve productivity, service delivery and eliminate duplication;
2. A radical overhaul of Cape Town Tourism’s systems and technology. This includes a new centralised online booking system called VMMS that will enable much enhanced data management and online real-time bookability;
3. A new point-of-sale system across our network of Visitor Information Centres part of a new retail and commercial strategy;
4. A sophisticated financial management software programme Syspro is currently being phased in. This will eliminate duplication, streamline operational processes and increase efficiency;
5. A relook at our membership programme. We are looking to devise different models of membership with different tiers of involvement;
6. A business model that will see the Marketing and Membership Departments work in a more integrated way, focussing on the link between product development and marketing;
7. Further reduce our reliance on public funding by forging partnerships with industry and the private sector. Revenue generation is key to our industry’s ability to sustain a year-round tourism employment foundation;
8. Re-evaluating the footprint of our Visitors Information Centres (VIC) in the Cape Town Metropole. We will consult international best practice and emerging visitor trends to ensure that our VIC model remains sustainable and relevant.

Conclusion

Cape Town is not a traditional city like London, Paris or New York. Instead, Cape Town is a “challenger” destination. We are among the cities that present possibility, freedom, freshness, transformation and a vision for the future rooted in an interesting and imperfect past. As people search for authenticity, inspiration and meaningful experiences, the web and social media have made it possible for challenger destinations like Cape Town to compete head-on with more established cities. Cape Town has the potential to become a leading place in which to live, work, study, visit and invest.

Cape Town Tourism is committed to remaining future-fit to play our part in making this vision a reality.