They’re back with money

Love ’em or hate ’em, the excellent news for South Africa is that the tourists are coming back.

There may be a temptation to be nostalgic about the time when you didn’t have to compete for sun loungers with the Müllers from Düsseldorf, and you could enjoy your main course without hearing the Fink-Nottles from Tunbridge Wells converting the prices back into pounds and falling about laughing. But the reality is that the country needs them back, and needs to get on with the job of extracting every possible unit of delicious hard currency from their wallets.

City Lodge’s interim results announcement said that Stats SA reported 677,838 foreign tourists in South Africa in December 2022, a vast improvement on the 263,108 doughty souls who braved the trip in December 2021. It’s still a way off the pre-pandemic number of 981,038 in December 2019, but the trend is moving strongly in the right direction, even after resisting the temptation to shovel a huge quantity of loot in the quixotic direction of Tottenham Hotspur.

City Lodge reported that its occupancies in the second quarter were well in excess of pre-pandemic levels, while room rates achieved are a mere 1% above 2019 levels. It has rolled out a new food and beverage offering at Town Lodge and Road Lodge, and enhanced the menu at City Lodge, so that food and bev revenue was up 132%, and now constitutes 16% of total revenue.

There’s considerable pressure on the cost side, including a R7.4m bill for running generators in loadshedding, but at least the company’s back in business.

South Africa needs to extract every possible unit of delicious hard currency from their wallets