Cape Town Tourism is guided by the clear vision of positioning Cape Town as one of the world’s top 10 tourism destinations in terms of economic yield, and developing tourism’s role in:

• Establishing Cape Town as one of the world’s greatest cities to visit, live, work and invest in.
• Driving economic and social transformation.
• Promoting and helping to achieve the wider city vision of being celebrated globally for “creative freedom”.

The simple, bold target is to double the economic impact of tourism on the city by 2020.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup™ was a significant milestone and a major focus for Cape Town Tourism’s activity in 2009 and 2010. The event was not an end in itself, but rather a springboard for sustainable, long-term growth and legacy enhancements to the city and to international awareness of the city. At the same time, it was also a platform to begin to seriously address one of the greatest barriers to economic development in tourism: seasonality.

The high-level vision for tourism in the city provides the focus and framework for our strategic objectives. To fulfil these objectives, we identified eight strategic priorities that are the focus of our 2009-2010 business plan:

• Hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ visitors successfully.
• Realising the longer-term marketing legacy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup™.
• Cape Town 365 – generating high-yield tourism all year round, using business and events tourism as a catalyst for growth.
• Cape Town at large – spreading the benefits as widely as possible across the city region.
• Strategic planning and leadership for tourism in Cape Town.
• Industry engagement – improving the performance of Cape Town’s tourism businesses and maximising their involvement in Cape Town Tourism’s programmes.
• Citizen engagement – getting the people of Cape Town to “Live and love Cape Town”.
• Developing the business to generate more commercial income for Cape Town Tourism to enable it to grow without necessarily relying only on additional public-sector funding.

We undertake our work on an integrated basis, maximising synergies between marketing, industry and visitor services to ensure effective delivery on the marketing promise and maximised return on investment for the city and our members. 

There cannot be a disconnect between marketing and visitor services. They should be considered as part of one continuum or life-cycle, communicating with people at different stages in the “customer journey”.

Visitor services can be seen as the “after sales” or “in-destination” service of marketing, with Visitor Information Centres representing the public face of that service and a platform to promote and market the unique elements and experiences offered by Cape Town. 

Critical to Cape Town Tourism’s success is our ability to forge effective partnerships with many different players, to maximise the co-operative resources available and maximise return on investment. Our partners include members of the tourism industry and business at large, as well as local communities, local and provincial government, national and international tourism stakeholders, the trade and the media.