Tourism industry out to limit travellers' delays
Digital platform to make check-in faster
The government is planning to introduce a digital check-in system for the tourism sector to minimise time delays for travellers who have to fill out Covid-19 forms when arriving at hotels.
Tourism minister Mmamoloko KubayiNgubane, who this weekend kick-started the reopening of the sector after months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic, said she would be looking into possibly funding a digital platform that could be used by the sector to keep information of guests before their arrival.
Kubayi-Ngubane visited Parys in the Free State and the Vaal in Gauteng where she participated in various activities including quad biking, bowling, archery, a boat cruise and a game drive as part of encouraging local travel to boost the hard-hit tourism sector.
“We’ve got to find mechanisms of automating some of these things [so] that basic information is kept as you book, then it must be there so that when you arrive you just verify to say is there anything that has changed and then you sign quickly and get in,” she said.
“Because other people are going to be impatient, you arrive at reception you spend 15 minutes completing forms and people may have travelled for a long time and they are tired and all they want is to get to their rooms and rest. Now if you are going to have forms that are long and taking long [to fill in] it might discourage people.”
She said that she wanted to encourage South Africans to start travelling, trusting that it was safe to do so. “[We want] to communicate with South Africans to say, as we said, please get out and enjoy the tourism sector ... I’ve got out as the minister, I’ve been to the sites and I’m here and I can tell them that it is safe to get out and enjoy after months of being in the houses,” KubayiNgubane said. “We really need
South Africans to support the tourism sector, it employs a lot of people.”
Kubayi-Ngubane said that she was happy with the compliance at the places she visited where there was regular sanitising and social distancing was maintained.
She said she was however worried that the need to comply to the safety regulations, including the buying of personal protective equipment, might become an issue, especially for small businesses that are struggling.
She said she would speak to big corporates to try to continuously supply PPEs for struggling small businesses.
“It might not directly be from the department but it’s something I really have to think about, especially from SMMEs because I don’t want them to cut corners and end up compromising the sector,” she said. “So either we will engage with big business to see how we can do it or also even within our departments and other people to say how do we close that gap because I do see it as a gap that might compromise what we are doing.”