Durban - Durban faces the threat of declining international tourist numbers in the face of increased global competition, lack of international air access, global economic issues and, historically, not being marketed well.
To mitigate these issues and increase tourism, the city launched a comprehensive Economic Development and Visitor Strategy at the Hilton Hotel on Wednesday.
A key component will be a greater focus on growing Durban as a global investment and tourism destination.
Phillip Sithole, the head of eThekwini Municipality’s business support, tourism and markets unit, said the strategy was aligned to the national and provincial tourism strategies.
“Currently 3.8 million tourists visit Durban annually, which includes about 633 000 foreign tourists,” he said.
This generated R5.7-billion for the regional economy, supporting 61 000 jobs.
“By doing nothing and not marketing and developing the tourism sector, these figures are predicted to decline below the current levels by 2020. This would fall to 3.5 million tourists spending R5.9bn (at current prices and not taking into account inflation) and supporting only 56 000 jobs,” he said.
“As part of our plan, we are targeting core countries that include the UK, US, Germany, India and China, which already make up our largest source markets for international tourists. We have secondary target markets like Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand and, of course, Africa, but we want quick gains from core markets,” he said.
Alternatives
“We want to take Durban to the world, and that means we need to change how we look at the world and how we do things… We believe it’s important not to rest on past achievements but to focus on attracting foreign visitors by offering competitive alternatives to countries like Dubai, India and Australia,” said Sithole.
A target has been set to increase the number of tourists to five million by 2020. This would include growing foreign tourist arrivals to a million.
The jobs target was 74 000 in the tourism sector and to push its economic contribution to GDP to R10bn within the next seven years.`
“Tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy and is central to job creation and youth employment, as well as creating more economic opportunities.
“The sector was one of the major contributors to KwaZulu-Natal’s GDP,” said Durban deputy mayor Nomvuso Shabalala.
“Hosting major events has a positive impact on the province and increases the potential for Durban as a leading events destination in Africa.”
Sithole said as part of the plan they would “treat Gauteng as a country” in terms of attracting more tourists from outside KwaZulu-Natal.
“Right now 60 percent of the visitors to Durban are from other parts of KZN, but only spend about 11 percent of the R5.7bn mentioned.
“The rest comes from the high-spending international tourists and visitors outside the province, mainly from Gauteng. Therefore we are targeting these markets to grow the sector.”
Tokozile Xasa, the Deputy Tourism Minister, said that Durban’s targets were ambitious but were key to South Africa achieving its national goal of attracting 20 million tourists by 2020.
She said from attracting about 3.4 million foreign visitors 20 years ago, South Africa saw 13.5 million last year. - The Mercury