South Africa’s Gauteng province to tap Indian market for sports and film tourism

Gauteng – in Sotho-Tswana language is rightly called the ‘place of gold’, as it is the wealthiest province in South Africa and is considered the financial hub of Africa. The destination is now trying to attract the Indian market through sports and film tourism.

Elaborating on the idea at Africa’s Travel Indaba 2022, Sthembiso Dlamini, CEO, Gauteng Tourism Authority said, “We want to promote sports tourism activities in Gauteng as a part of our  tourism marketing and development strategy by leveraging our quality sports infrastructure, and skilled personnel . Since India also shares the same passion for sports we see an opportunity in that space.”

South Africa which is known as Bollywood’s favourite destination for film shoots has of late become a popular choice production houses. Many scenes of Bollywood blockbusters and reality shows have been shot in South Africa. Dlamini said that Gauteng also plans to attract Bollywood film-makers. “We are positioning ourselves as a film destination. We are partnering with the Gauteng Film Commission, for positioning our destination as a preferred film shooting destination.” She added that the destination has a huge partnership with Netflix.

Speaking about promoting the destination she added, “We are planning more and more campaigns with South African Tourism.” “We are also visiting places and looking for insights and intelligence about what consumers are looking for so that we can design our product accordingly,” she said.

The destination is planning a two-fold strategy to attract incentive business from the Indian market as well. While explaining this strategy, Dlamini said that Gauteng is known as a business destination. “We are engaging with corporates that are already based in Gauteng so that they can talk to their counterparts based in other countries about choosing Gauteng as one of their preferred places for hosting events. Our second strategy is engaging with international communities, and missions based in Gauteng to connect us with corporates and to help position us as a preferred corporate incentive destination. We are also conducting a sales drive in partnership with South African tourism.”

Emphasising their plans about promoting South Africa to the Indian travel trade, she said, “We are a part of SATTE and we are visiting India to position our destination as a preferred incentive destination to some of the corporates. We are also partnering with Indian media, as we believe that there are specific media houses that are focused on corporates, MICE, and incentives. Hence, we are planning to place the right content on the right platform for the right audience.”

Dlamini is confident that the golden province’s destination marketing efforts at Africa’s biggest travel event – Travel Indaba and at India’s biggest travel event – SATTE following a two-year pause will bear fruit and she hopes to see good business from the Indian market.