Some hotels faring better since Soccer World Cup

This is on the Fifa Soccer World Cup last year which saw hotels, mainly in Johannesburg and Cape Town, adding rooms.

"There has been a lot of negative sentiment around the hospitality sector but it's not all doom and gloom. There are nodes that are doing better than last year," Protea Hotels group marketing and advertising manager Nicholas Barenblatt said on Friday, 2 September 2011.

Unlike Cape Town and Johannesburg, the secondary areas - such as Nelspruit, Bloemfontein and Polokwane - performed better this year than last year because they did not "have much of the latter part of the World Cup".

"Despite everyone thinking the World Cup was going to do so much for the sector, it only really benefited the key areas, and the outlying areas suffered," Barenblatt said.

City Lodge CEO Clifford Ross conceded that the World Cup had depressed trading in smaller towns. The improvement in secondary areas is partly due to smaller towns not seeing the addition of extra rooms as happened in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban ahead of the soccer showpiece.

The large metros were still struggling to deal with the surplus of rooms, said Barenblatt. His comments are borne out by the statistics shown by hospitality consultancy STR Global.

In Limpopo and the Northern Cape the number of rooms sold year on year in July rose 39.2%. In Nelspruit and surrounding areas rooms sold rose 22.7% with Durban and surrounds reporting a 33.8% increase. In contrast, this measure of activity for Cape Town fell 14.4% and in Sandton and surrounds rooms sold in July fell 17.1%.

The performance of Protea Hotels, which is the largest hotel group on the continent, "is very much in line with these trends", Barenblatt said.

Source: Business Day