Despite the challenging environment during Covid-19, the sector displayed strong business resilience
10 November 2022 - 20:04Optimism is building for the SA travel and leisure sector as all of us get ready to enter 2023. Tourism continues to recover after the challenging operating environment faced during Covid-19.
Hotel room occupancies fell to a dismal 12% in 2020, while casinos operated at extremely low capacity due to limitations on indoor gatherings. The sector generated little to no income for most of 2020. In fact, revenue fell more than 60% in 2020 compared to 2019. Given the inherent high fixed-cost structure of these businesses, profitability took a big hit, as can be seen in the operating losses and the negative operating cash generation incurred during the period.
Casino, sports betting and bingo have also improved trading significantly this year. Interestingly, Sun International indicated during its half-year results at the end of June that its overall July 2022 income was in line with 2019, and the company expects a significant improvement in the second half of the year compared to the prior comparative period.
To further support tourism recovery going into 2023, airlines such as Emirates have recently announced plans to ramp up operations in SA. Emirates aims to increase flights between Dubai and SA from 42 to 49 weekly by May 2023. In addition, Emirates is also introducing new services between major domestic airports, with three daily flights to and from Johannesburg as of March 1 2023.
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