Future-Proofing South African Tourism in the Wake of Covid-19
South African Tourism
Destination: South Africa
Engagement: 2020
COVID-19 threw the global travel and tourism industry into crisis, and South Africa was not spared. As the national destination management organization (DMO), South African Tourism played a pivotal role in leading the country’s recovery efforts, enabling sector collaboration, and driving innovation.
To support these efforts, South African Tourism retained a consortium of advisors, including Twenty31, to oversee recovery objectives. The National Tourism Sector Recovery Plan was established to provide a strategy and roadmap for the local tourism industry to recover to pre-crisis levels.
Implementation
System shock from the pandemic allowed us to apply zero-based design principles more directly than would have been possible otherwise. Zero-based design approaches business operations as a proverbial clean slate, treating the organization like a start-up with a fresh mandate. It streamlines processes by eliminating constraints, identifying redundant and unnecessary legacy, emphasizing collaboration, and acquiescing only to necessary constraints like governance and controls.
Setting up a PMO
A project management office (PMO) was established to guide priorities recognized as critical to the broader recovery objectives and national tourism development goals. These included reimagining strategy insights and analytics, refining the marketing investment framework, optimizing the tourism execution model, and integrating the technical hub, as well as the initial operations model and organizational design implications.
Since implementing the National Tourism Sector Recovery Plan, South African Tourism has seen a continuous upward trend in tourist arrivals. The plan helped the organization address and largely overcome pandemic-related challenges by focusing on investment, product development, policy, land usage, infrastructure, and marketing. Now one of the most forward-thinking DMOs globally, South African Tourism’s model is being emulated by other destinations in their quests to modernize post-COVID-19.
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Future-Proofing South African Tourism in the Wake of Covid-19
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