Audrey D’Angelo
Huge growth in international and domestic tourism and in business travel expected in the next three years might mean that Johannesburg had too few hotel rooms to cope with demand, Danny Bryer, the director for marketing and sales at Protea Hotels, said this week.
He said Johannesburg, the entry point for the majority of international and regional travellers, had only 16 000 hotel rooms compared with more than 60 000 in Dubai.
It would take three or four years before any new hotel on which building was started now to be ready for occupation.
He noted that four- and five-star hotels in Cape Town city, which for the past two years had had an oversupply, were filled to capacity during the Mining Indaba held recently.
Although all the major hotel groups have invested millions of rands in accommodation in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban in readiness for the upturn in the market, most of this has been spent on refurbishment or enlargement and improvements of existing hotels, some of which have changed hands.
Protea, believed to be the largest South African hotel group, took over several establishments in this country in the past two years and is still developing new ones in other parts of the continent. But it currently has only one under construction in this country.
That is a Fire and Ice brand being built in Menlyn Maine, the upmarket precinct near Pretoria, where Sun International also intends to develop a new hotel and casino fronting on the Town Square provided the Gauteng Gambling Board gives permission for its gambling licence to be transferred from the Morula casino. Bryer added that Protea’s Fire and Ice in the Town Square would be ready by the end of 2014.
He said most of the travel in South Africa at present was corporate. Much of it was coming from South Africa’s fellow members of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping.
Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport had been developed as a hub and SAA had two flights a day to and from Sao Paulo, the commercial capital of Brazil, which were arriving fully laden.
“The world is coming out of an economic downturn and now we are entering an upturn,” he added.
Leisure travel from these countries was expected to pick up, particularly from China, and despite Europe’s difficulties people from South Africa’s traditional source markets of the UK and Germany were still travelling. An increasing number of visitors from other African countries were on holiday rather than on business as their economies improved.
A spokesman for the City Lodge group said it planned to build two more hotels, including one in South Africa. The group opened its first hotel, the City Lodge in Bryanston, 28 years ago and now has four brands with 6 440 rooms in 42 hotels, of which 24 are in Gauteng.
The two biggest hotel nodes in Johannesburg are in Sandton, where City Lodge has four, and OR Tambo International Airport, where it has five.
Its other hotels in greater Johannesburg are five in Pretoria and one in Midrand.
The group is now expanding outside South Africa with the first City Lodge it has built in Gaborone due to be formally opened by Botswanan Minister of the Environment, Wildlife and Tourism Onkokame Mokaba today.
Michael Tollman, the chief executive of Cullinan, which owns Thompsons Travel, also forecasts growth in tourism, particularly from China, where it has opened an office in Shanghai. It recently acquired Springbok Atlas coach company and other tourism interests from Imperial Holdings.