Sun International says SA is scoring `own goal` with overly complex visa regime

Source: News24, 14/04/2023

The Palace at Sun City Resort which is owned by Sun International. The company said SA should simplify its visa requirements for foreign travellers to boost tourism.
• Sun International says SA should fix its visa regime and make it easier for foreign visitors to come to the country.
• The owner of Sun City believes a simplification would result in a surge in tourism and help address the country`s dismal unemployment problem.
• There is particularly potential to attract tourists from China, which has about 140 million outbound travellers a year.
Sun International says SA is `scoring a couple of own goals` if it does not simplify its visa regime for foreign visitors.
Graham Wood, COO of the company, which owns Sun City along with other top hotels and casinos, said on Wednesday if SA allowed visas on entry - instead of forcing potential visitors to have to apply for them in their home countries - there was potential for the `floodgate to open`.
Wood, who was speaking at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the annual conference of the Global Hotel Alliance in Cape Town, said a couple of things needed to be addressed immediately in SA to boost tourism, including making it a priority industry, improving airlift to both Johannesburg and Cape Town, and amendments to the visa system.
He said that, along with mining, the tourism industry is one of SA`s biggest employers, offering significant potential to help address the country`s roughly 33% jobless rate.
As far as airlift to SA was concerned, he said the country was `well on the way to addressing` the issue, especially in centres such as Cape Town and Johannesburg.
`Making it difficult`
But referring specifically to visas, Wood said that the country had to make it easier for `customers to get to us`, citing the long distances foreign tourists already had to travel when they chose SA as a leisure destination.
`The point is, you are already asking a customer to make a conscious decision to not go to Europe and come down south, and we are making it quite difficult for you to come here because it is quite difficult to get visas.
`We should be having visas on arrival. We talk about the Chinese recovery [the return to travel after hard lockdowns].`
He added:
It is a nightmare for a Chinese customer to get to South Africa. So we are scoring a couple of own goals in terms of the visa regime. If we fix the visa regime, then we should see a floodgate opening in terms of people wanting to come to South Africa.
In light of the tourism sector`s potential as a `major employer of people`, Wood said more had to be done to make tourism and hospitality studies `part of the fundamental education curricula in our country`.
Enormous potential
He said this would be important in stimulating the growth in skills and the `development of an interest in an industry` that at the moment is not attracting young talent as a first-choice career.
Speaking to News24 in an interview about the visa issue after the panel discussion, Woods said it was fine to impose visas on people coming to a country, `as long as you do it in a way that you can apply for a visa on arrival`.
`Don`t make people have to travel to embassies, stand in queues and pay a lot of money for visas because it is going to turn people off because they can go to other destinations in the world where they don`t need a visa or if a visa is required, they can get it on arrival when they land at the airport.`
He said foreigners definitely wanted to come to SA, adding there was enormous potential to attract Chinese tourists, who were particularly interested in visiting SA and the rest of Africa.
He referred specifically to a statistic provided by panellist Bernold Schroeder, CEO of hotel group Kempinski, that there are 140 million outbound Chinese travellers a year.
`If we could just get 1% of that, that is 1.4 million Chinese travellers. Pre-Covid, we were only [getting] 150 000 to 180 000 [Chinese] travellers into South Africa. Imagine we got 1.4 million travellers, how many more jobs that would create.`
Surge in business conferencing
Earlier during the panel discussion, Wood also spoke of how Sun International, which also owns the Wild Coast Sun and Table Bay Hotel among others, had seen its `hotels and resorts sector` lead the recovery for the whole group in its 2022 financial results, which were released recently.
He said the company was `primarily a casino group` but income from this business, apart from online gaming revenues, had been relatively flat, with hotels and resorts leading the way. After the Omicron wave of Covid-19, he said, `we saw a recovery being domestic leisure-led, with strong weekend and holiday domestic leisure across all our properties, followed very quickly by a surge in conferencing, far more than I ever expected in the conferencing segment.`
Wood said he believed the major uptick in conferencing was due to a `need` of companies and organisations to `get away and connect` in light of the growth of the remote working environment.
`And we saw a huge surge so much so that we exceeded our 2019 conferencing revenues as a group by 25%. And then what we saw the international [tourism] recovery starting to come late quarter three, quarter four, of 2022, particularly into Cape Town.`
And moving into 2023, he said the conferencing growth had continued with `forward bookings` across all its properties looking `very strong`. At the same time, domestic and international leisure travel was continuing to experience stronger growth.
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