A Convenient Truth
For groups with attendees from around the world, South Africa becomes a logical and strategic destination.
By Rowland Stiteler
Last summer, a Copenhagen-based medical equipment company Called in EVENT FIRM THE COMPETENCE CO. TO HELP plan a strategic meeting for 260 members of its sales force from 22 countries.
“This worldwide medical company was undergoing some strategic changes, and for the beginning of its coming fiscal year, it wanted to get everyone together for an extremely work-oriented event that would enable these people who had been working more or less independently of each other in their locations around the world to bond and forge their vision for the future,” said Michael Bramsnas, CEO and owner of The Competence Co.
The attendees would be coming from countries around Europe—including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom—but also from Australia, Japan, South Korea and North America.
“Our brief from them was to find the best location, based on having the right infrastructure to support such a meeting; plus it would need to be a destination with good airlift,” Bramsnas said. “We set for ourselves the goal of finding a place where every attendee could fly with a maximum of one stop en route.”
Additionally, the medical company wanted the destination to be cost efficient, relatively speaking, as well as temperate—after all, the meeting needed to be in January or February, but that didn’t mean attendees had to be cold.
The best strategic location turned out to be Cape Town.
Cape Town is approximately 10 hours by air from most cities in Europe—not exactly a cheap ticket from a Euro-centric perspective. But, factoring in all the other-worldly destinations from which attendees would be coming, South Africa suddenly began to look convenient.
“They’ve got a first-class tourism and meetings infrastructure,” Bramsnas said. “Everything you need for a proper conference is there. And there is great destination appeal in South Africa.”
The closer Bramsnas and his client looked at South Africa as a strategic conference destination, the better they liked it.
And that is a conclusion to which a growing number of international companies are coming, according to Paul Stephen, managing director of Cape Town-based DMC South Africa, which The Competence Co. chose as its partner in South Africa for the event.
“It has a benefit most people outside South Africa may not know—it’s only a one-hour time zone difference from most of Europe,” Stephen said. “So after you make the flight, get a good night’s sleep at your hotel and wake up the next morning, you’re already in sync with the time you’re used to, and communicating with the home office is not a problem, because there is not a big time-zone gap.”
The infrastructure turned out to be excellent for the medical company meeting as well, even though the client had a very distinct concept of what it wanted—a meeting in the round, with the speaker in the center and all 260 attendees seated in a big circle around the speaker’s position, so as to facilitate maximum interaction. That configuration was easy to put together inside the new Cape Town International Convention Centre, with the entire group housed at the 300-room Southern Sun Cullinan Hotel, which is adjacent to the convention centre. Both are convenient to the Cape Town Waterfront, a popular dining and entertainment district.
South Africa’s richness and vastness almost became a challenge for the two event partners putting together the conference, because it was largely an all-work affair, with meetings beginning at 08.30 at the convention center and lasting until 16.30 during four days of the five-day conference.
“We didn’t really have time to take the attendees out into South Africa, which is the rich treasure of a destination that is the focus of the trip for most of our visitors,” Stephen said. “So we were able to bring South Africa to them. We brought in the South African culture with tribal dancers and performers who came to the convention centre and with evening events around town, in which we could give the attendees a good taste of our country’s culture without actually traveling very far at all.”
In that sense, the medical meeting was atypical of a South African event for an international group, Stephen says.
“When you come to South Africa you don’t just get a single country, you get an entire region,” he said, adding that it is not unusual for visiting groups to also take short flights to the world-famous Victoria Falls, near the town of Livingstone in neighboring Zambia, or to hop a plane to Kruger National Park, also a world-renowned treasure, where what Africans call the “Big Five”—lions, leopards, buffaloes, elephants and rhinos—can be seen up close in Land Rover-propelled observation and photo safaris conducted by four- and five-star resorts situated in the big game park.
“Typically, it’s the destination appeal that brings groups to South Africa,” said Yolanda Woeke-Jacobs, director of sales and marketing for Dragonfly Africa, a destination management and incentive travel company. “When people travel that far to get here, it’s nothing to hop on a plane for short flights to magnificent destinations, so when you come to Cape Town, you really have access to three or more distinctively different destinations in one trip.”
But while most groups might put in a few hours on a plane for Cape Town side trips, the medical group handled by Bramsnas and Stephen was able to get a good sampling of the continent’s culture with no more than a few short auto trips from the hotel.
Perhaps the most impressive side trip for attendees was the cable car ride to the top of Table Mountain, which offers a view of Cape Town and the ocean. Then there was the opening event in the convention centre in which planners brought in a Zulu dance group and a South African witch doctor—a “praise singer” in the tribal tradition—who literally sang the praises of the medical company’s president before turning the conference over to him. There were also a number of “taste of the town” dinners, which also happened to be a “taste of the continent,” with pan-African cuisine.
And the most impressive “insider” event for the group was a dinner at Groote Schuur, the grand estate and presidential palace of Cecil Rhodes, founder of the former Union of South Africa, the predecessor of the Republic of South Africa. It was in this 19th-century mansion surrounded by a massive garden that the former president of the white minority-ruled government negotiated with then-prisoner and later president Nelson Mandela in 1990, paving the way for the creation of the majority-ruled country that exists today.
The medical group also bussed to a winery estate near Cape Town, at which a gala dinner was preceded by an hour-long African drum lesson and concert in which each of the attendees got a drum and learned how to use it.
“By the end of the session, the group was making beautiful music with the drums,” Stephen said. “Africa was in their veins and in their blood, and the music showed it.”
Bramsnas says he received great feedback from his client on the quality of the meeting experience, in which the group forged its collective vision of the future for its business, as well as for the immersion in the South African culture, which all the attendees experienced without leaving Cape Town. One+EMEA
ROWLAND STITELER is a freelance writer has written extensively about the global meeting and event industry.
Transportation Tips
- South Africa offers several luxury trains for tours around the region, including the Blue Train, which runs from Cape Town to Pretoria and to Durban; the Desert Express, which runs through Namibia; and the Rovos Rail, which travels around the region in immaculately restored, historic rail cars pulled by a steam locomotive.
- Delta Airlines recently added nonstop service from Atlanta to Cape Town.
What’s New in South Africa
- South Africa has been ramping up its tourism infrastructure, including highways and hotel construction, for the 2010 World Cup soccer games, which are expected to attract 400,000 visitors.
Fun Fact
- If you love white wine, Cape Town is a great destination. With more than 10 major wineries near the city, a good bottle of wine in a restaurant in the city costs the equivalent of €7 and a formal, multicourse, incentive-style dinner in a restaurant costs about €28, including transportation to and from your hotel.