Tourism Business Responses to South Africa’s Covid-19 Pandemic Emergency

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled tourism businesses to rapidly adjust operations in newer and more resilient ways as firms have to change priorities and respond to challenges, including of shifts in consumer demand. Extant research on tourism business responses and adaptations to COVID-19 highlights the significance of organizational resilience and ability of businesses to respond to uncertainty. Using a qualitative approach this paper investigates tourism business responses in South Africa, seemingly the country worst hit on the African continent by the COVID-19 crisis. The research analyses tourism business responses occurring in one of South Africa’s tourism-dependent areas and thus most exposed to the radical effects of COVID-19. Key findings are of the self-reliant character of the community of tourism enterprises in and around Overstrand cluster in the Western Cape. Product diversification, reductions of prices, reduced staffing, changed marketing, greater inter-enterprise cooperation are several of the most significant business adjustments undertaken. With the negative financial impacts of COVID19 on local tourism enterprises exacerbated by South African government measures for alcohol bans and beach closures there is evidence of a disconnect and lack of trust between the area’s local businesses and national government.

Adaptive Strategies Employed by the Mice Sector in Response to Covid-19

“…The above findings affirm with the available writing on the reactions of tourism businesses to COVID-19 (Rogerson et al, 2021;Giddy and Rogerson, 2021;Steriopoulos and Wrathall, 2021;Dillette and Ponting, 2021). This additionally ties into the devastation of the pandemic to livelihoods, as respondents in the current study (alongside others represented in literature) underscored the importance of the sector to job creation and economic development.…”

“…For instance, one respondent, a meetings planner explained that, 'So we were able to implement some immediate strategies to try and cut some overheads and try and just restrict the operating costs'. This came as a result of the economic losses resulting from both the national and international lockdown regulations (Haywood, 2020;Kuscer et al, 2021;Rogerson, 2021), which not only halted the operations of the MICE sector, but also caused much uncertainty around when this form of tourism would resume. In fact, the national lockdown measures of South Africa had begun with an initial 21 days where only essential services of the country were permitted to operate (Bama and Nyikana, 2021;Hemmonsbey et al, 2021;Nyawo, 2020).…”

African Tourism in Uncertain Times: Covid-19 Research Progress

“…In the case of ecotourism in Ghana Soliku et al (2021) point out that existing facilities are over-reliant on the international market and starting to pivot towards the promotion of domestic tourism. Certain parallels emerge with the results from South African research on the adaptive responses of local tourism businesses (Giddy and Rogerson, 2021;Rogerson, 2021;Rogerson et al, 2021).…”

“…For South Africa it is demonstrated that adaptation to the crisis has been challenging because of the financial distress experienced by tourism enterprises in the wake of minimal government support (Booyens et al, 2021). Adaptive responses included downsizing of businesses, including worker retrenchments, price-cutting and readjustments to attract the domestic market, limited initiatives towards product diversification, energetic social media marketing and, in the case of accommodation enterprises, the re-purposing of properties (Rogerson, 2021). A strengthening of local inter-enterprise cooperation has been an additional widespread response (Giddy and Rogerson, 2021;Rogerson, 2021).…”

“…Adaptive responses included downsizing of businesses, including worker retrenchments, price-cutting and readjustments to attract the domestic market, limited initiatives towards product diversification, energetic social media marketing and, in the case of accommodation enterprises, the re-purposing of properties (Rogerson, 2021). A strengthening of local inter-enterprise cooperation has been an additional widespread response (Giddy and Rogerson, 2021;Rogerson, 2021). For nature-tourism enterprises alongside price discounts targeted at domestic tourists, the promotion of adjusted tourism product offerings towards an emerging Black South African middle class domestic market has been a favoured adaptive response (Giddy and Rogerson, 2021).…”