Tourism Services under Level 3 Lockdown in South Africa

Statement by Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane – COVID-19 alert level 3 risk adjusted strategy tourism sector response measures and directions.

TOURISM SERVICES UNDER LEVEL 3

Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane highlight the areas that have been opened up under Level 3:

• Restaurants for delivery or collection of food. Restaurants with liquor licenses are allowed to sell alcohol only for takeout and delivery. In this area, there’s been an outcry that they must be allowed for onsite consumption. We are in discussions with restaurants so that whatever solution is provided in this regard for sit-down doesn’t perpetuate the inequality and we are confident that in our next submission to NCCC this will be considered.
• Professional services - e.g. tourist guides, tour operators, travel agents, tourism information officers are allowed to come back to operations.
• Professional Services including training of nature guides and other related services that are able to ensure safe distance.
• Public and private game farms have been opened for self-drive excursions
• Hiking to be done in compliance with existing guidelines and not in groups
• Accommodation activities are allowed, except for leisure and establishments will no longer require a letter from Minister of Tourism to operate. They are required to ensure that they accommodate those in the permitted services and keep records for inspections by the department.
• Hunting and Gaming activities are also allowed.

The following economic activities will remain prohibited under level three and these include:

• Conferences, events, entertainment activities (such as Festivals) are still not permitted. It must be noted that some of the conference venues have been used in the fight against the pandemic and as such are allowed to be operational, including being used for distribution points of social relief measures
• casinos not permitted
• leisure travel not permitted

TOURISM RELATED SERVICES  CONTINUE

We welcome the opening of domestic commercial flights that have been opened for business travel for now as part of the Inter-provincial movement, as announced earlier by Minister Mbalula. The tourism sector will benefit immensely from this step as travel is an integral part of tourism.

Car Rentals are a critical enabler of tourism and movement of people and we are encouraged by them coming to full operations.

We also welcome the fact that those approved to travel are allowed to use long-distance public transport to do so from 1 June, including inter-provincial travel. The accommodation and Restaurant subsector and other related services will benefit immensely from these activities.

The opening up of hunting will also be a big boost to the tourism sector. The hunting industry contributes an estimated R2 billion (direct spending) annually to the tourism sector and it also contributes to employment in rural areas. So, this is an important step towards the recovery of the sector.

We have developed directions for the tourism sector to either enhance or provide further clarity on the existing regulations issued to limit the spread of the virus - and in a manner that they can be adaptable in a rapidly changing context. We support a responsible approach by the sector in coming up with innovative ways to prevent the spread of the virus, however, all protocols should be accessible and not preventive to smaller players in the sector. In this regard, I welcome the commitment by the industry, particularly the bigger players to provide support to small players, through training and other means to ensure sector-wide compliance.

RELIEF FUNDING FOR TOUR GUIDES

Following my meeting with tour guides in which they expressed their plight and how the various governmental relief initiatives have neglected them, I went back to the Department and had a discussion about what can be done to assist this subsector. As you are aware, the tour guiding subsector is dominated by freelancers and independent contractors with no job security and for this reason the government relief schemes including the tourism relief fund did not cover them.

In response, the Department has come up with an additional financial relief mechanism for tourist guides. We have set aside a total of R30 million which will provide financial relief over a period of two to three months. The beneficiaries of this scheme will include:

Tour guides who are registered with the registrar in terms of the Tourism Act, and
Tour guides who are not employed by any company, and those that have not formed their own companies which means that they are freelancers or independent contractors without job security.
As they also prepare themselves for the sector reopening, they too would require to adhere to the necessary protocol for containment of the spread of the virus. In this regard, we shall also be making further provisions to ensure that they also receive personal protective equipment (PPE). We trust that this support, will go some way in providing relief to the tourist guides.

RELIEF AND RESPONSE MEASURES

To ensure that SMMEs in the tourism sector survive the crisis we put together the tourism relief fund. The application window for the Covid-19 Tourism Relief Fund will close on 31 May 2020 (which is tomorrow). The Tourism Relief Fund provides a once-off capped grant of R50 000 per entity to subsidise expenses towards fixed costs, operational costs, and other pressure cost items.

To date, more than 6 000 completed applications for grant assistance have been received from across the country. A large bulk of the applications were from businesses that provide accommodation services (2495), followed by hospitality at (1825), travel related services (1780) and other at (662).

However, we have received feedback from applicants who experienced a number of challenges when they attempted to apply for the fund through our online system. Some had difficulties uploading documents onto system, some requested many times to submit documents they had already submitted and some were unable to access the system.

To remedy some of these challenges we encourage those that still have outstanding documents to submit before the closing date. The department will accept email submissions. We have a team working around the clock today and tomorrow, calling each and every applicant considered eligible with outstanding documents to submit before the end of tomorrow.

I am told that so far, the calls the team has made to some of the SMMEs have yielded positive results and these SMMEs will be receiving the much needed relief.