Success Stories from Tourism Enterprises in South Africa

Case studies from the ILO Sustaining Competitive and Responsible Enterprises (SCORE) project

SCORE Training for SMEs was introduced in the travel and tourism sector of South Africa in 2011. The sector supports one in every twelve jobs in the country, and as a fast growing and labour-intensive sector, it has the potential to create many more work opportunities. However, South Africa’s travel and tourism industry faces a number of challenges that must be addressed if this potential is to be fulfilled.

The national spirit of entrepreneurship is evident in the sector but many start-ups fail to create employment opportunities. In addition, many tourism enterprises adopt practices that are not environmentally sustainable and provide jobs that are too often characterized by industry-specific decent work deficits. Such enterprise practices can impact negatively on employees and communities, undermine productivity and service quality, and reduce the sector’s overall contribution to social and economic development in tourism areas and nationally.

With the aim of addressing these challenges the South African Government launched the National Minimum Standards of Responsible Tourism in 2011. SCORE Training for toursim SMEs, which is fully aligned with the NMSRT, was introduced to South Africa in the same year.

More than 60 enterprises have already completed SCORE Training, and reported improvements across a range of parameters, including communication and worker-manager relations, job satisfaction, service quality, resource usage and waste, complaints and cost savings. This collection of success stories sets out the improvements experienced in six of these enterprises from the Maloti-Drakensberg Park (KwaZulu-Natal province) and the Kruger National Park (Limpopo province).