Cape Town notches up ’best summer ever’

Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain looms over the city's Waterfront district. File picture: Reuters

Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain looms over the city's Waterfront district. File picture: Reuters

Published Apr 5, 2012

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South Africa’s main tourism destination, Cape Town, will host the Two Oceans marathon with a record number of local and international entries and spectators during the Easter weekend.

It follows the Cape Town jazz festival, which attracted thousands of visitors last weekend.

Both form part of a programme of events that began with stopovers by contestants in two international yacht races during the winter.

It is designed to extend the tourism season by attracting both local and foreign visitors and make the city a year-round destination.

Cape Town International Airport is crowded this week with arriving contestants in the marathon race and their supporters, and with families from Gauteng coming to spend the school holidays at the coast.

The actual numbers will not be known until next month. However, international arrivals grew by 12.3 percent in February to 75 043 compared with 66 834 in the same month last year, while regional arrivals grew by 22.3 percent to 5 884.

The growth in arriving passengers began in December when the holiday season started with a rise of 17 percent in international arrivals.

Calvyn Gilfellan, the outgoing chief executive of Cape Town Routes Unlimited (CTRU), said yesterday that this had been “the best summer ever” for the region. CTRU until March 31 existed separately as the tourism authority of the Western Cape but has since been absorbed into development organisation Wesgro.

Although some city hotels and guest houses had done well others had not been full, said Dirk Elzinga, the Cape chairman of the Federated Hospitality Association of South Africa (Fedhasa). He pointed out that the oversupply situation caused by the opening of a large number of new establishments in time for the World Cup in 2010 had not yet been absorbed.

However, the growth in visitors is expected to continue as a result of the doubling in size of Cape Town’s International Convention Centre (ICC) over the next three years. This will enable it to host more and larger international conferences and exhibitions.

International conferences, also described as “business tourism”, have been identified as the most lucrative sector of tourism, attracting high-spending delegates who often stay on to explore the country as leisure travellers, or return with their families on holiday later.

Architects have been appointed to design a huge extension to the ICC to be built over the next three years.

This will add flexible multi-purpose exhibition space in line with international trends and is expected to put the final touch to the regeneration of the Foreshore as the business hub of the city centre.

Durban’s convention centre, which hosted the huge international conference on climate change in November, also doubled in size in 2007.

Head of communications Sandy le Brasse said it had a full programme of events over the Easter holiday period including the East Coast comedy show with a line-up of comedians including Marc Lottering. - Audrey D’Angelo

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