Travelling South Africa

TravelMole Guest Comment: The online travel market in South Africa

&Quot;The flight + add-on hotel online booking segment is still in an early adopter stage. Domestic travel was and still is a major driver of flight only bookings and the majority of domestic travellers in South Africa are travelling to visit friends and relatives (VFR) with only around 12 to 16% going on holiday and business trips representing around 5% of all trips. In other markets, business travellers have been a major driver of flight + hotel (+ other e.g. car) bookings.  This segment then evolved further as traditional holiday package consumers moved away from booking standard packages, demanding more flexibility and being wooed with promises of cheaper prices from so called “dynamic packaging". 1.    The evolution of this segment from innovator through early adopters to early majority driven by a combination of the innovative new companies that have emerged and perhaps one of the more traditional tour operators – who will need to move quickly if they are to remain competitive. The evolution will be shorter than some would envisage as I believe the market conditions and the right ‘industry players are in place to make this happen. 4.    A ‘shake-out’ in the current travel players as both tour operators and travel agencies work through how to embrace the internet as a direct sales channel and ‘consumer-power’ starts to emerge. All travel companies, whether operators or agents will need to be clear on what value they offer and make that ‘value proposition’ clear and tangible to their customers. It is a really interesting time to be involved in South African travel and tourism. I suspect  over the next two to three years we will see who are going to be the major players in an industry that has great potential and opportunities for those bold enough and shrewd enough to take make the right decisions and leverage the right technology.

South Africa's Farm-to-Table Movement - Articles | Travel + Leisure

Consider, if you will, the vegetable garden. Every Afrikaner farm worth its salt has one—a testament to the white African tribe’s almost mythic love for the land—and there’s no reason why Babylonstoren , a handsome, 1692-built Cape Dutch homestead turned luxury hotel and working guest farm in the Franschhoek Valley of the Cape Winelands, should be any different. But this garden is on an altogether grander scale.

I’m sitting in the sleek kitchen of my suite, a modern glass cube attached to a traditional thatched-roof, 18th-century landhuisie nectarines, and grapefruit watered by a restored sluice system; even an apiary for honey. And vegetables, too—butternut and beets; rocket and radishes; peppers of impossibly bright hue. If it all looks meticulously landscaped, it is—by French designer Patrice Taravella, creator of the medieval monastery gardens at Prieuré Notre-Dame d’Orsan, in the Loire Valley. In the distance, clouds tumble over craggy peaks and vineyards stretch to emerald foothills, but it’s the garden that has me enchanted.

Best of all, it’s mine. In the ultimate farm-to-table fantasy, as a guest I get to walk its mazy paths, pick whatever herbs, fruits, and vegetables I fancy—there are some 300 edible varieties—and prepare them in my designer kitchen. And if I don’t fancy cooking? Well, I can just amble down the tractor-cut road outside my door to the farm’s restaurant, Babel. A milk-white, cement-floor room, it has a daily menu written on a tiled wall dominated by a giant ink print of a bull’s head—a pricey piece bought in Milan by Babylonstoren’s co-owner and designer Karen Roos. Why a bull? Well, this space used to be the cattle kraal, of course.

Twenty years ago, Franschhoek—Afrikaans for “French corner,” named for Huguenot refugees granted land here in the 1680’s—was a beautiful, though somnolent, farming backwater. In the mid 1990’s, as South Africa emerged from the isolation of apartheid, trendsetting pioneers arrived to open inns, wineries, and restaurants. A decade later the valley had been transformed into an African Provence (in a Switzerland-like setting), a hub for great food and wine and stylish living. Its top properties, Le Quartier Français and La Residence, and restaurants such as Reuben’s Restaurant & Bar , became destinations in their own right. In the past year, though, a slate of glamorous hotels and restaurants, with Babylonstoren at the forefront, have been upping the ante, embracing a confident new South African style that reflects the region’s past as much as the future.