Tourist muggings no advert for city
Memorable moments while on holiday are often shared afterwards, boosting tourism further down the line. Tourists leave SA and share their antidotes with friends and families which may entice others to visit our shores. But this will not be the case for the group of tourists targeted in broad daylight in Central on Monday.
Seasoned tour guide Robert Lourens said he was leading the group of 12 tourists from the cruise liner Seabourn Sojourn on foot through Gqeberha’s historic Fort Frederick area when the muggers struck.
Instead of spreading the good news on what the city has to offer, the 12 tourists will share with friends and families how they were attacked while visiting the city.
They will revisit the horrific ordeal, and recall how a mugger pulled a firearm and another threatened them with a knife.
The grazes and bruises will be shown to families and friends, which will create a negative perception of what our city has to offer. They will not want to return and neither will anyone who hears about the attack.
In a nutshell, this leads to fewer tourists in our city, which hurts many businesses.
The incident has prompted a call from Discover Mandela Bay for the municipality to do more to protect the cruise liner industry which this past season injected about R75m into the city’s economy with the arrival of 45,000 tourists.
Safety and security political head Lawrence Troon also flagged the need for an urgent meeting of stakeholders to tackle the issue.
But as Lourens pointed out, there was security all over the Donkin Reserve and Fort Frederick earlier this year.
Having security stationed in Central helps protests tourists and residents alike. This is not hard to do as such an attack hurts the city’s global reputation.
The best advertising these days comes from Facebook and Instagram posts, along with word of mouth.
These 12 tourists will not have anything positive to share.
To paraphrase the words of Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane: “This is [not] a good story to tell.”