By Corne Oosthuizen, Certified Business and Executive ActionCOACH
The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the tourism, hospitality, arts and entertainment industries (along with many other business sectors). But business is rebuilding. In the Western Cape, the tourism and hospitality sectors have shown quite a turnaround in the last 1.5 years.
According to the Federated Hospitality Association of South Africa (FEDHASA), in 2023: ‘The Western Cape yielded more consistently positive metrics, with 73% of surveyed accommodations seeing increased turnover versus the same period in 2022. FEDHASA attributes these optimistic indicators in the Western Cape to rising domestic and international arrival numbers and notable improvements in staff retention and service delivery enhancing the guest experience.’
As a business coach, I personally walked the challenging pandemic journey with my clients. Both my lodge and guest house clients managed to register as essential services during the lockdown periods; which gave them an opportunity to salvage some income. Staff also worked skeleton shifts and luckily no staff were retrenched during this period. The lodge had to think outside of the box and identify opportunities which they could capitalize on. They offered the community meals that were delivered to their residences and used the time to do much needed renovations and repairs to the building and premises. They also listened to my advice to continue with their marketing activities, so that when business slowly recovered, they were a step ahead of the competition.
One of the keys to surviving through the pandemic was to stay in touch with the customer base through newsletters and e-mails informing them of the services that were still on offer during COVID-19. Many clients were in a state of shock when lockdown was announced, and they stopped communicating with their customers, plus reduced their marketing activities. In hindsight, they have realised that this was a mistake. Those that heeded the call are grateful to confirm that occupancy rates have recovered, and they are performing better than some pre-COVID periods.
The realisations of how to survive unprecedented challenges have served these clients well. They now have a proven ability to activate organisational resilience and explore opportunities during crisis. The importance of staying in contact with loyal client bases was another – those clients can carry a business through the challenging times. The last was that the ability to innovate – to adapt or tweak your service offering to capitalise on the changing market conditions is paramount. A good example of the successful implementation of this last point is the wine estates that started producing sanitiser. They used their facilities in a creative manner to still generate income.
In 2024, the landscape looks a lot brighter.
In the Western Cape, The City of Cape Town is doing a remarkable job in supporting the hospitality industries, and the tourism statistics are evidence of this. They have negotiated direct flights to Cape Town with more countries and this has opened new opportunities for the hospitality and tourism industries.
To take advantage of this, my hospitality clients have expanded their marketing to include international clients, offering more services such as shuttle services between the venue and the airport and negotiating daily tourism packages with the surrounding tourism destinations. The latter is an example of how the hospitality industry has realised that there is opportunity to collaborate with other establishments to grow the hospitality sector as a whole – to everyone’s benefit.
Some of the tried and tested ‘post-pandemic learnings and tools’ for the hospitality industry are:
• Build up a solid database of customers that you can market and target your marketing activities to.
• Offer more services to enhance the customer experience and collaborate with other establishments.
• Find a niche market to focus on and do very specific targeted marketing.
• Always ask yourself what differentiates you from your competitors and build on those points.
• Focus on improving the total customer experience from end to end.
The golden resilience thread that I leave you with is: “People don’t care what you do, they only care what you can do for them.’ Whilst this can be read as harsh, it’s what got the hospitality and tourism industries through an enormous crisis and will no doubt serve them in the long run.
ActionCOACH is a proud National Partner of the NSBC
About the author – Corne Oosthuizen
After completing a B Comm Marketing Degree, Corne joined the corporate environment and gained valuable knowledge, skills, and experience in the areas of sales, marketing, finance and overall business planning. After corporate life, he qualified as a Business Broker and assisted many Business Owners to sell their businesses, which they had built up over years with blood, sweat and tears. Too often however it broke his heart to see people work as slaves in their businesses, only to realize after many years that they did not have a saleable asset. Corne then decided to join ActionCOACH to change this reality.
About ActionCOACH SA
ActionCOACH SA provides business and executive coaching services in South Africa, Nigeria, Namibia, and Botswana. Provided by world-class individuals who have years of business experience and are internationally certified as business coaches. ActionCOACH SA is part of ActionCOACH, the global business coaching franchise that operates in over 80 countries with 1,000+ offices worldwide. For more information, visit: https://actioncoach.co.za/