Operating a successful tourism enterprise is like fitting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together without a reference – you only get to see part of the bigger picture as each of the pieces fall into place.
As an analogy, imagine each jigsaw piece to be knowledge on a specific subject. The first corner piece would be knowledge gained through your own experience and primary, secondary and tertiary education, followed with quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and even denary education. Other pieces would represent latent talent, ambition and entrepreneurship, while yet others would be blank pieces – waiting to be filled.
In the March edition of Tourism Tattler, we provide a few pieces of knowledge, that we hope will help fill the blank pieces in your puzzle. But remember the wise words of Confucius: “He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.”
In this edition we provide the latest South African Hotel Stats for the full 2014 year, which shows that hotel occupancies stabilised and room rates continued to improve, resulting in Average Room Occupancy (ARO) of 62.5%, with an Average Room Rate (ARR) of R1,019 and Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) at R637 across all hotels (page 08).
Our business section provides information on how to keep itineraries and inventory current (pages 11 to 13), while our DMO contributor looks at holiday likes and dislikes through a tourist’s eyes.
The hospitality section explores the next frontier in revenue management: Big Data for Hoteliers (page 16).
Our legal beagle, Louis the Lawyer continues his series on the law and contracts with Part 8 in this series (page 17).
In the marketing section, we look at trends that will influence travel in South Africa (page 18).
And finally, our Niche Tourism section looks at Accessible Tourism by providing recommendations from the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and a review on their latest publication, the UNWTO Manual on Accessible Tourism for All (pages 20 to 23).
As usual, our content is free to distribute and I encourage you to share and comment on articles published on our website – you may just win a Dietz Monarch Hurricane Lantern for taking the time to do so (see page 6 for more info).
Yours in Tourism,
Des Langkilde. [email protected]
