WHILE stakeholders in the tourism industry argue that there is no real evidence of a second wave of Covid-19 coming, and that international borders should be opened as soon as possible, the Tourism department is pushing domestic travel before it believes international travel can resume.
She urged the local tourist industry to look into using segmented marketing , and creating attractive packages and specials to make up for their losses suffered because of lockdown. With the minister at a virtual event in the Time Square conference centre, was a panel of industry members, with the chief operations officer hospitality of Sun International, Graham Wood; Professor Alex van den Heever the chair of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at Wits; Elmarie Slabbert, a tourism professor at North-West University , and Unathi Henama of the Tourism department at the Tshwane University of Technology .
“The modelling that was performed showed that there would be a peak in September. And what we are seeing in the actual data is that the models were completely wrong . They were also wrong in the number of deaths that they were projecting,” he said. But Kubayi-Ngubane argued that it was because of the government’s preventive measures that the worst case scenario didn’t come to light.
He said countries like Spain and France implemented 14-day quarantines for returning travellers for precautionary measures, and that was likely to happen for South Africa.