Oh, the places you will go with AI

Credit: Club Med SA

Club Med South Africa opened on the Dolphin Coast near Ballito in July. It’s the group’s first beach and safari resort in Southern Africa and represents more than R2bn in investment in the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast, as well as the largest hospitality investment in the SADC region since the 1970s. For a town the size of Ballito, a development like this changes the local economy, and the guests are only part of the story. “From King Shaka airport to where Club Med is situated, new businesses will begin to open up along the way because of this new establishment,” predicts Siya Mthethwa, chief strategy officer at South African Tourism. He says tourism ranks among the top contributors to GDP, and accounts for one in every 18 jobs created in South Africa. That figure only includes direct employment at a resort or a game lodge, not the indirect jobs created by the additional businesses.

All of those businesses depend on travellers discovering Ballito first, and Mthethwa says that the way people find a destination has changed. In nearly every market his office tracks, travellers who once booked through an agent now research cities, book flights and put together a complete itinerary using digital platforms. AI has become part of how it all comes together. “Think of the content that people will create from the moment they land at an airport to when they reach their destination,” says Mthethwa. “If it’s good content about their experience and it gets ingested by AI, it could determine how the destination is perceived by the world.”