According to WTTC’s latest city report for Cape Town, in 2016, Travel & Tourism employed around one in nine people in the sector, compared with 1 in 22 in South Africa as a wholegenerated 7.5% of the city’s GDP.

This year sees the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, yet the city has seen a dip in tourism arrivals compared to 2017, due in large part to ongoing concerns about the extreme water shortages that have been afflicting the region.

Despite these current issues, Cape Town has always been seen as a leading destination in the development of responsible tourism, ever since it made it a founding principle of its first Tourism Development Framework. It was also here that the eponymous Cape Town Declaration on Responsible Tourism was signed, at the first International Conference on Responsible Tourism in Destinations held in 2002. It was this declaration that contained the lines that have become the central mantra of responsible tourism, namely that it “creates better places for people to live in, and better places to visit.”

In 2009, Cape Town created a city-wide Responsible Tourism Action Team made up of key tourism organisations and partners so as to develop its Responsible Tourism Policy and Action Plan. That same year, it won the Best Destination Category Award in the 2009 Responsible Tourism Awards held at World Travel Market in London. It’s not the only global recognition the city has received for its responsible tourism, either. In 2016 the V&A Waterfront, which is the heart of its tourist district and receives over 25 million visitors each year, was a finalist in WTTC’s Tourism for Tomorrow Awards in the Destination category.

The city also came top in the 2011 African Green City Index, with 3,571 parks and other protected areas covering a total of 54,000 hectares or 22% of the city’s land area. And the Cape Town Green Map now lists over 500 businesses and organisations.

Prominent responsible tourism organisations cover the entire spectrum of tourism, ranging from the carbon neutral airport hotel Hotel Verde to AWOL’s award winning township bike tours, backpackers hostels, guest houses and several other businesses that have been recognised by South Africa’s own (and the world’s only) Fair Trade Tourism scheme.

www.wttc.org