An analysis of tourism SMEs in South Africa

Abstract

In a comparative study of 37 participating countries on an analysis of Small Medium Enterprises (GEM, 2002) it was found that South Africa ranked the lowest of all developing countries, with only 3.3% of the adult population being involved in pursuing exploitable opportunities in various industries. Since 1994 South Africa has seen tremendous growth in tourism arrivals and 2002 saw a growth rate of 16.3%, which was one of the highest in the world. Even though tourism figures are on the increase, tourism SMEs are not really showing significant growth. This leads to the aim of this research, which is to do an analysis of tourism SMEs in South Africa. The analysis will entail determining the weaknesses, opportunities and threats that SMEs are experiencing. In order to achieve the latter, a survey of 150 successful tourism SMEs was conducted. These SMEs provided insight into all obstacles and threats they had experienced in becoming successful. This survey was one of the first of its kind in tourism in South Africa and from the results, recommendations are made on how to improve the current situation in order to grow tourism SMEs. In order to achieve its purpose, the paper is organised in the following manner: The first section deals with the introduction, problem statement and aim of the research; section two explains the research methodology; section three deals with the results; and the paper concludes with the recommendations in section four.

Keywords: tourism, SMEs, South Africa, tourism industry

South African Journal for Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation Vol. 27(1) 2005: 117-126