CAPE TOWN, South Africa – Rushdi Harper’s tour company in Cape Town was just starting to recover from a disastrous COVID-19 lockdown that had forced him to sell his house just to keep the business going.Until then, Harper’s Wow Travel & Tours, for which foreigners make up 80% of business, had been looking forward to a bumper Christmas season when travelers from a cold northern hemisphere – mostly Britain, the United States, and Germany – typically head south for the sun.
A succession of tough lockdown restrictions imposed in South Africa in 2020 hammered a tourism sector reliant on foreigners, with businesses closing and shedding thousands of hospitality jobs before the curbs were eased earlier this year. But coronavirus-driven lockdown and travel restrictions decimated tourist numbers. Total foreign arrivals slumped by 71% to less than five million in 2020 from just over 15.8 million in 2019, according to Statistics South Africa.Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, chief executive officer of the Tourism Business Council of South Africa, told Reuters that a survey of tour operators showed that the cancellations so far are worth about one billion rand.
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