Friday, 27 May 2011 16:23
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Interview with Sugen Pillay
Global Manager: Events at SA Tourism interviewed about the upcoming Sports & Events Tourism Exchange (SETE)
Hello Sugen. Tell us a bit about yourself and how SETE came about? (held over 3 days 27-29 July 2011, Cape Town)
SA Tourism is a tourism destination marketing agent that's aimed at promoting South Africa as a global destination outside of the country. Our main mandate is to attract foreigners into South Africa. The reason that we partnered with the Temba department of trade and industry is that in the years before the FIFA World Cup, a lot of questions were asked including how we sustain the investments the country had made from the World Cup? It's really about creating a platform for the events industry in South Africa to showcase itself to the rest of the world and to position South Africa as an events destination and that means we want to attract more events into the country going forward.
What is SA Tourism's quantifiable goal once the dust has settled after SETE?
The main objective is to attract as many events into the country as possible. We have a set target every year to attract foreigners into the country. Our top target for 2010 was to bring in 10 million foreigners into South Africa. We exceeded that target, we brought in 11 million. Events contribute to the target, so the more events we bring into the country, the more people come to South Africa. We witnessed that in 2009, when the rest of the world was going through a decline in global tourism arrivals, South Africa experienced a 3% growth of arrivals. That was largely due to the number of events we had in 2009. Example the IPL, The Confed Cup, British and Irish Lions tour, ICC Trophy and we had the final draw in Cape Town towards the end of the year. This all contributed to the growth. What we are saying is, that because bringing tourism into South Africa is part of our mandate, events form a very critical part of that mandate.
photo: www.southafrica.net
How will Tourism SA gauge the results of SETE?
We set ourselves our targets for SETE. It's the first year so we don't expect it to be as big as the Tourism Indaba is now. At this stage we are seeing 30,000 people going through the doors of Tourism Indaba, it took the Tourism Indaba over 30 years. We are expecting about 2,000 delegates to pass through the doors. We looking at targeting about 150 exhibitors at the event. We are bringing in 60 international buyers from around the world to come and see what we have to offer as South Africa. I think we can get those numbers right more importantly after the event. If we had a number of events coming to South Africa on an annual basis, that to me is a great achievement.
We see that SETE will host speakers from South Africa, Germany, the US, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Who are the main speakers? Are any speakers advocates of mass participation endurance sports like running, cycling and triathlon?
The conference itself is aimed at learning some lessons from destinations that are globally competative as sport destinations. One of the speakers is from Barcelona, to talk about the impact of the Olympics Barcelona brand. It was one of the success stories from the Olympics. We want to learn from those lessons in South Africa. We are about brand building. The rest of the world doesn't know us as well as they know other destinations. That's why we're constantly competing to occupy that awareness pace. That's one of the levels we're looking at.
We also want to learn some of the lessons we've been through as a country and the World Cup is a classic example. Great things that we did, how do we take it forward? The second day is the most important day. It's about crafting a sports strategy for South Africa. We've got major players already involved. Sports and Recreation. SA Tourism, now it's really about asking difficult questions. Do we need a national billing fund that's going to support sports federations and certainly cities that are going to bring more events into the country. Do we need a structure to be established? Do we have organisations that have their own mandates? How do we bring those mandates closer together, so that we can contribute to sports tourism in a big way. So those are some of the difficult questions we're going to be asking. I'm hoping after the second day, we can come up with a mandate as South African Tourism and Department of Sports and Recreation on how we move forward in this industry. Also importantly, what is the role of the Sports Federations in bringing more events into the country? Endurance sports forms an important component of that because it contributes towards the sports economy in a significant way.
Part of our problem at the moment is we don't have a proper market intelligence around the different codes of sport and the impact they have on the country. Part of our strategy going forward is to set up a unit or have more resources that can be driven by proper market intelligence. Example: at SA Tourism, all our marketing complaints are driven by market intelligence. We have a very strong strategic research unit within the organisation, that looks at the leisure market. What I'm talking about from the sports point of view, is that we need dedicated resources that would give us more market intelligence. So when we grow in a position in South Africa as an events destination, we know how to position it based on proper information.
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