'International tourist arrivals have already surpassed the 2019 numbers – the pre-Covid numbers – and we're not even into our high season yet’: Enver Duminy, CEO of Cape Town Tourism.
‘What happened during the pandemic – that's where we all came to realise how important [domestic tourism] is in every country,’ says the operations chief of JSE-listed City Lodge Hotels.
The big challenge in the industry ‘at the moment in the country is more the leadership issues, because in anything that is not being led, you get things going into disarray,' says Ramawela, an industry stalwart who has been in the sector for over 25 years.
Three and a half years after millions of office-goers were sent home en masse, companies, employees and governments are still figuring out how to adapt to lasting changes to corporate life.
‘We know that it's a lot of money, but the exact details of the expenses we don't know. I think in terms of open procurement, that's something that taxpayers need to know in terms of what happened to their money,’ says Dr Marlise Richter, senior researcher at Health Justice Initiative (HJI).