
(3 minutes read)
· The Tourism Business Council of SA predicts about 600 000 direct tourism jobs will be lost in 2020 alone
· The main components of the sector-airlines and hospitality-may take time to restart. Industry feels that domestic leisure tourism will only be able to restart in December and international tourism by 2021
The Tourism Business Council of SA predicts about 600 000 direct tourism jobs will be lost in 2020 alone. The domestic leisure tourism
will likely only be able to resume in December and international travel next year.
Experts warn that severe job losses will be there if the global tourism industry is not opened up at least by September. The World
Travel & Tourism Council indicates up to 197 million job losses world-wide if the industry is only widely opened again by September.
The loss due to that to the world’s combined GDP would be US$5.5 trillion from travel and tourism’s contribution to world GDP if the
global industry is only widely opened again by September.
The main components of the sector-airlines and hospitality-may take time to restart. Tourism industry feels that domestic leisure tourism will be able to re-start in December and international tourism by 2021. The Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA), a body set up by the private sector, feels that about 600 000 direct tourism jobs will be lost in 2020 alone if the industry is not allowed to open
up – even at a phased-in approach – as soon as possible. According to the WTTC, during 2019 the global travel and tourism sector supported
one in 10 jobs, or about 330 million in total, and contributed 10.3% to global GDP.