International bookings by tourists travelling to Cape Town have reportedly dropped by 10%. The statistic depicts a drop in tourism numbers up to the end of May this year.
Cape Town Tourism says that incoming travellers from China specifically has decreased by 87% amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
The decline, as a whole, is a result of more than simply a decrease in incoming tourists, but is also a result of falling business trips.
“What we’ve also looked at is the tour market to understand where this drop-off is. And what we saw is an 8% drop in forward bookings from the UK, from France a 21% drop and then the Netherlands around a 12% drop,” CEO of Cape Town Tourism, Enver Duminy told EWN.
Speaking to Cape Talk, Duminy said that other findings that relate to forward bookings provide more context and balance to the situation. “In the forward bookings we have seen a 5% increase in bookings from Germany, 4% from the USA, 11% from Australia and about 7% from Brazil,” he said.
In order to ensure that the tourism and travel market is not too heavily affected, Duminy told Cape Talk that one of the strategies will be to shift messaging into markets that they hope to grow, in order to offset some of the declines.
Listen to the Cape Talk interview here:
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