“It Starts With You”: Is that the message from DEAT? Or to them?

Cape Town – If DEAT want to guide the industry to service excellence, they must lead by example, starting with service to their own partners and allies – the industry and other stakeholders.

It’s been two weeks now since the DEAT conference that launched the draft strategy on service excellence. But we’ve still not had sight of the strategy itself. It isn’t on the website and an e-mail requesting a copy has gone unanswered for more than a week – not so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. How are we expected to take this kind of thing seriously when the champions of the strategy don’t seem to?

I was going to give this topic a rest for the week, but Monday morning’s Business Report contained a prominent and lengthy piece by the department’s deputy director-general. The piece invited us all to the DEAT website where the document would be available (I certainly couldn’t find it in spite of twenty minutes’ effort, though I did find the Tourism branch section on “Projects” was blank, save for an “under construction” message). In their defence, the department doesn’t currently have a chief director of communications or a director of external communications, but then why launch into an awareness campaign if your own house isn’t in order? Putting a document on a website or replying to e-mails within a week don’t seem like particularly tough communication challenges.

The newspaper piece also set up the red herring that “the tourism industry bravely acknowledged” its service shortcomings (bravely?), and then it proceeded to spin a bunch of rosy growth figures, as if encouraging us to buck up because the department is here to make it all right. Well, I don’t have a list of delegates to the conference, but this kind of confessional attitude about our troubles just doesn’t ring true.

As I ask around the industry, I see big players who have been growing by leaps and bounds who are now anxious about declining domestic travel, reduced foreign direct spend, growth rate projections slashed by half over the next decade, delays in infrastructure capital projects, and anxiety about government’s ability to hold up its end of the 2010 bargain amid ballooning construction costs, rising costs of capital and the pressures of other domestic priorities as unemployment increases week by week. The smaller players complain about lack of transformation and access to industry channels and the market. LTO’s fret that their membership will decline in the lead-up to 2010 as every rand is scrutinised for value. Local municipalities worry the tourism sector won’t be delivering the projected jobs and growth that justify their investment in the sector in the first place.

On the list of industry priorities, service excellence factors somewhere down near “confront growing competition from Namibia” and “need to learn a bit of Mandarin”. Yes, real, but no, not particularly pressing at the moment, thank you. When it comes to walking the talk, this seems about the same priority the department gives it too. And where is the TBCSA in all this, the supposed co-champions with DEAT of the service quality initiative? Not even mentioned in the newspaper article. Is the industry’s highest-level private sector body just window dressing? An afterthought? Taken for granted? Superfluous? Or simple oversight? You can draw your own conclusions.

At least the strategy has a new name beyond the National Service Excellence Strategy for Tourism (NSEST). The name? “It Starts With You“. Well, here’s to the department taking their own advice if they want to be taken seriously as leaders. Yes, it starts with you. Don’t spin the stats, don’t hype the priorities, and build the industry’s confidence in your leadership and strategy by demonstrating service excellence with your closest partners first.

About Blogger
KURT ACKERMANN writes, researches and consults on strategy, business models and brands for organisations adapting to globalisation and technological change. He is the proprietor of the Afrikatourism blog for responsible travel at afrikatourism.blogspot.com.

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