The Tourism Business Council of SA hopes it will be able to engage further with SA Tourism over their differences on the proposed deal to sponsor English football club, Tottenham Hotspur for nearly R1bn over three years.
The two bodies are at loggerheads after TBCSA that the deal was not well thought out and Tourism SA digging in its heels and insisted that the proposed deal was good for the tourism industry in SA.
TBCSA CEO Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa said they believed they should have been consulted as an industry.
"We have been saying for a long time that people should not plan for us as an industry, without us. They should not work in isolation from us. There should be nothing about us without us. We are the tourism industry, not them.
"We can exist without SA Tourism but they cannot exist without us," he said.
Tshivhengwa said SA Tourism’s insistence that they would go ahead with their plans showed that the consultation they were alleging to be having with the industry was a mere tickbox exercise.
“You cannot be saying you will go ahead [even after the industry has expressed its misgivings]. They should be saying we will re-.evaluate and feedback, said Tshivhengwa.
The fallout between the two follows a report on Wednesday by Daily Maverick saying SAT were considering a proposal to enter into a 36-month deal, believed to be a sleeve sponsorship, with English Premier League club Tottenham at a cost of R910m over three years.
SA Tourism CEO Mzikilikazi Themba Khumalo Thursday defended the deal saying it was not the entity’s job to fix infrastructure or develop sporting talent.
“The money that's invested in tourism is not the same money that's required for energy. It's not the same amount of money that's required to fix potholes. There are other departments that are dedicated to that and are given that mandate by legislation.
“Our legislated mandate is about persuading international people to travel into the country and spend money in our economy and that is what we will stick to whether it is through this initiative or another one. That is what we are paid to do and we'll continue to do until we're told otherwise,” Khumalo said.
Khumalo confirmed the deal was not yet finalised but the SA Tourism board had given provisional approval pending consultation with stakeholders, which include Sisulu and National Treasury.
He said the deal would bring in more money to the SA economy, and through it, the department would be able to persuade international tourists to travel to SA.
“The envisioned deal has got absolutely nothing to do with football, it has got to do with accessing the aggregated audiences that football brings. We are after the viewers of football that have the spend and willingness to travel long haul to our destination,” he said.
“Ours is to spend money to persuade travellers to come to SA to spend money. That is what we're legislated to do.
“Sport and entertainment are audience aggregators, so people will pay money to have you access their product.
“Our deal has nothing to do with football because ours is to access the viewers who watch the football to become part of the travelling market to SA.
“We are accessing the audience in the EPL so that they can come to SA to spend money here through tourism. This deal is not isolation with other deals that we have in place because it's not about football, it's about audiences.”
TBCSA rejected SAT’s argument saying it was marketing to those who already did not need to be convinced to visit SA instead of selling the country to new markets.
“This proposal does not consider of where our growth for the tourism sector is going to come from.
“Our growth is not going to come from Europe- those are our traditional source markets which we need to defend. Our focus should be on what are the growth markets – For us the growth markets that will help us achieve our target of 21 million arrivals by 2030 are India and China,” said Tshivhengwa.
“Whatever we do has to do with how we grow the China and India market. We need to work with the trade on the ground in those markets to stimulate demand there and we need more airline connectivity between SA and those two markets.
“We need to defend our position in our traditional markets like the UK – we already have high awareness in these traditional markets like the UK,” said Tshivhengwa.
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