The South African Business Tourism team plays a facilitative and connecting role in support of Convention Bureaus and business tourism product suppliers. We perform this role as a way of fulfilling South African tourism’s central mandate of sustainable GDP growth, sustainable job creation, and redistribution and transformation.
To inform this we focus on 6 key supportive activities:
- Understanding the market
- Choosing the attractive segments
- Marketing the destination
- Facilitating the removal of obstacles
- Facilitating the product platform
- Monitoring and learning from tourist experiences
We co-ordinate the various business tourism association bodies under the umbrella of the
South African Meetings Industry Federation (SAMIF) in order that we may all face industry challenges together, and grow in a unified fashion. We meet quarterly with this organisation to discuss industry-related issues.
We don’t actually organise business tourism meetings, conferences, exhibitions or incentives – rather, we play a supportive role for those who do. For example, we will put business tourism organisers in touch with Convention Bureaus and product suppliers that can best fulfill their needs. These are typically the organisations that operate under the SAMIF umbrella, as well as incentive and leisure companies that belong to the Society of Incentive & Travel Executives (SITE), who can help in planning the Incentives and leisure aspects of business tourism activities.