Rushdi Harper’s tour company in Cape Town was just starting to recover from a disastrous COVID-19 lockdown that had forced him to sell his house just to keep the business going.
Then the Omicron variant of the coronavirus struck.
Until then, Harper’s Wow Travel & Tours, for which foreigners make up 80% of business, had been looking forward to a bumper Christmas season when travellers from a cold northern hemisphere – mostly Britain, the United States and Germany – typically head south for the sun.
But Omicron’s sudden emergence last month prompted the imposition of international travel curbs on southern Africa, hotspot of Omicron, that have “given us quite a setback again,” Harper, the company’s managing director, told Reuters.
“Fifty percent of our bookings were cancelled for December alone,” he said, and 40% for January, he said at the Cape Town waterfront, with a view of its legendary Table Mountain behind him. “As a small business like ours, that’s probably about a million rand ($63,274.72)…lost in a very short space of time.”
A succession of tough lockdown restrictions imposed in South Africa in 2020 hammered a tourism sector reliant on foreigners, with businesses closing and shedding thousands of hospitality jobs, before the curbs were eased earlier this year.
Now, travel restrictions imposed by the European Union, Britain and the United States because of Omicron, designated a viral strain of concern by the World Health Organization, have cut off South Africa’s three biggest foreign markets.
Wow Travel & Tours started seeing cancellations when news of Omicron broke late in November, with quite a number from Brazil, the United States and Germany, often at the last minute as flights were axed.
Abundant wildlife, stunning scenery and renowned vineyards have made South Africa one of the world’s big long-haul travel destinations, establishing tourism as a pillar of the economy.
But coronavirus-driven lockdown and travel restrictions decimated tourist numbers. Total foreign arrivals slumped by 71% to less than 5 million in 2020 from just over 15.8 million in 2019, according to Statistics South Africa.
