OVERSTRAND TOURISM REPORT (JUNE 2026) – as tabled in council on 26 August 2026
Author: Jayne Rogerson
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report presents the findings of a comprehensive, evidence-based study of the Overstrand tourism economy, commissioned by the Overstrand Local Municipality. It is the first detailed investigation of its kind since the PricewaterhouseCoopers baseline study of 2010, and it arrives at a critical juncture, a period in which the local tourism economy has substantially recovered from the disruptions of COVID-19 and now stands at a point where deliberate, forward-looking policy choices will determine whether the Overstrand secures its position as one of South Africa’s most distinctive coastal destinations, or cedes ground to better-organised competitors. The study draws on multiple research methodologies: desktop analysis of international and South African policy frameworks; quantitative tourism economic data at municipal scale; 46 face-to-face semi-structured interviews with tourism businesses and local government officials; comparative interviews with Western Cape tourism offices; and three large-scale online surveys canvassing 183 tourism businesses, 73 non-tourism businesses, and 1 450 residents of the Overstrand.
Introduction and Methodology
Local governments “occupy a complex, central role at the heart of the tourism industry” (Shone, 2013). The Overstrand Municipality is, in this sense, at the proverbial coalface of one of South Africa’s most tourism-dependent local economies. Recognising that the last fifteen years had passed without dedicated research to guide policy, the municipality commissioned this study to analyse the challenges and expectations of local tourism businesses, to understand how comparable Western Cape municipalities organise their tourism functions, and to obtain broad community feedback through systematic surveys. Six research objectives frame the investigation: an international scan of local government tourism practice; a review of the evolving South African policy environment; a data-driven analysis of the Overstrand tourism economy benchmarked against comparable municipalities; an in-depth stakeholder interview programme with local tourism businesses; comparative interviews with four Western Cape tourism offices and the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism; and three online surveys spanning tourism businesses, non-tourism businesses, and residents. Each objective employed the research method most appropriate to it (desk research, proprietary economic databases, purposive qualitative interviewing, and structured quantitative survey instruments) producing a triangulated evidence base designed to support sound and defensible policy decisions.
Local Governments and Tourism: The International Experience
A review of the international record reveals that local governments across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom have long played a decisive role in shaping the competitiveness and sustainability of tourism destinations. The key insight from this body of experience is that the dominant “industrial policy” approach to tourism, which prioritises short-term stimulus, destination marketing, and visitor numbers, is increasingly regarded as insufficient. In its place, leading jurisdictions are adopting an integrated, long-term approach that recognises tourism policy as inseparable from land use planning, environmental management, infrastructure provision, community development, and economic diversification. Local governments that have performed best are those that moved beyond siloed, sector-by-sector policy-making to embrace what the OECD terms a “whole of government” approach: one in which inter-sectoral complementarities are actively planned for, the public interest is protected, and tourism is understood not merely as an industry to be stimulated but as a social and environmental system to be managed. The international experience also underscores the risks of over-reliance on a single attraction, the corrosive effect of inadequate community engagement, and the reputational damage that flows from inconsistent or corrupt planning processes. These lessons carry direct relevance for the Overstrand.
Local Governments and Tourism in South Africa
South African policy since 1994 has progressively clarified the role of local government in tourism through a series of landmark documents: the 1996 Constitution and White Paper on Tourism, the 1998 White Paper on Local Government, the 2010 Tourism Planning Toolkit, successive National Tourism Sector Strategies, the 2023 Tourism Sector Master Plan, and the 2024 White Paper on Tourism. Running through this entire policy lineage is a consistent, if not always operationalised, principle: that tourism is a concurrent function of all three spheres of government; that local municipalities bear primary responsibility for the on-the-ground environment in which tourism takes place; and that the exact role of any given municipality must be calibrated to local conditions, skills, and financial resources. Critically, the accumulated policy evidence confirms that “the decisions and actions of the entire municipal organisation determine whether tourism thrives or flounders in a local area” (van der Watt, 2013). Tourism in South Africa is not the sole responsibility of a single tourism line department; it is shaped by every decision the municipality makes, from land use and infrastructure to public safety and economic development. The 2024 White Paper reiterates this emphatically, calling for the harmonisation of the tourism mandate across all spheres of government and the explicit inclusion of tourism priorities in Integrated Development Plans.
Understanding the Overstrand Tourism Economy
Drawing on S&P Global’s Tourism Model (the only source of tourism economic data available at municipal scale in South Africa) this section establishes the structural significance and recent performance trajectory of the Overstrand tourism economy. The data confirm that tourism contributes approximately 20.8% of local GDP, placing the Overstrand eighth among the most tourism-dependent local municipalities in the country. Leisure tourism dominates the visitor mix, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all trips, and the international market is of disproportionate importance: while domestic tourists outnumber international visitors in trip terms, international visitors generate the majority of commercial bednights, staying significantly longer and spending considerably more per visit. Total tourism spend reached its highest recorded level of R2.85 billion in 2024, and leisure trip volumes have similarly hit a new peak. However, the recovery has not been uniform. Comparative benchmarking reveals that the Overstrand’s relative ranking in national tourism spend has held steady at 25th – suggesting that while absolute performance has recovered, competitors such as Saldanha Bay, Mossel Bay, and Kouga have bounced back from COVID-19 more strongly. This pattern of relative underperformance, set against a backdrop of exceptional natural assets and a world-class infrastructure platform, is a central finding that subsequent sections of material seek to explain.
Tourism Business Responses
The 46 face-to-face interviews conducted with tourism businesses across the Overstrand, spanning accommodation, restaurants, wine farms, attractions, event organisers, and real estate agents, present a nuanced picture of a sector in confident but cautious recovery, set against persistent structural frustrations. Sentiment towards the municipality is mixed: core service delivery (infrastructure maintenance, street cleanliness, visible security) attracts consistent and genuine praise, with several businesses noting that the Overstrand compares favourably against the national context.
However, this goodwill is eroded by significant pain points in three areas. First, the planning and building department is widely experienced as a barrier rather than an enabler of investment, with excessive regulatory friction, slow approvals, and a perceived culture of “no” deterring both development and business confidence. Second, tourism signage is described as chaotic, inconsistently branded, bureaucratically inaccessible, and in many areas simply absent, while the municipality’s UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy accreditation remains unknown even to businesses who would most benefit from it. Third, communication between the municipality and the tourism sector has deteriorated significantly since the departure of a key outward-facing tourism official, leaving businesses without a clear point of contact and the municipality without an effective “bridge” into the private sector.
On business performance, the overwhelming majority of interviewees report that 2025 has returned to pre-COVID levels, with October whale season and the international leisure market driving recovery. Staffing emerges as the single most critical operational challenge, with businesses routinely sourcing management-level staff from Cape Town due to an absence of locally trained hospitality talent. Geographic inequality is a recurring theme: businesses in Stanford, Gansbaai, and Kleinmond consistently report feeling marginalised relative to the Hermanus CBD, both in terms of municipal attention and tourism marketing.
Tourism Marketing, Tourism Offices, and the Role of the Municipality
Tourism marketing is identified by businesses as the single most critical area requiring improvement. The near-universal perception is that the Overstrand is being under-marketed as a destination: most businesses are unaware of any meaningful municipal destination promotion, the “Overstrand” brand itself is regarded as an administrative label with no emotional resonance for tourists, and the destination’s narrative remains almost entirely captive to whale watching despite a rich and diverse offering of wine, gastronomy, hiking, adventure, beaches, art, and heritage. This over-reliance on a single seasonal attraction carries strategic risk, vividly illustrated by the intense contraction of Gansbaai’s shark cage diving sector, which has lost 59% of its visitors over a decade, and it results in the persistent “one-night stopover” pattern that suppresses both bednight yield and the spread of economic benefit.
Overstrand’s tourism offices are experienced as outdated in physical presentation and limited in their marketing function, though individual staff members are praised for their dedication. The weekly tourism diary is valued; the bricks-and-mortar model is not. Businesses call for a professional, dedicated destination manager, a digital-first marketing strategy, and a visible presence at national and international trade shows where tour operators design itineraries one to two years in advance.
As for the municipality’s broader role, there is a clear and consistent message: the strong foundation of service delivery and infrastructure must be maintained, but the municipality must now evolve from service provider to active economic facilitator, breaking down regulatory barriers, enabling skills development, coordinating the tourism ecosystem, and providing the strategic direction that the private sector cannot generate in isolation.
Municipal Tourism Offices in the Western Cape: A Comparative Perspective
In order to situate the Overstrand’s tourism governance within the Western Cape context, detailed interviews were conducted with the provincial Director of Tourism at the Department of Economic Development and Tourism, and with representatives of four comparative municipal tourism offices: Visit Stellenbosch, Mossel Bay Tourism, Plett Tourism, and the former Saldanha Bay Tourism Organisation. The provincial director identified the structural landscape as a “mishmash” resulting from the repeal of the Western Cape Tourism Act and the enforced separation of funding relationships under MFMA Circular 131, which now requires open tender processes for what were previously direct municipal grants to tourism bodies. Against this backdrop, the standout models of Visit Stellenbosch, Mossel Bay Tourism, Plett Tourism share a set of common characteristics: semi-independent governance structures with public-private boards; diversified funding combining municipal grants (R5 million in the case of Mossel Bay) with membership fees and commercial revenue; professional, specialist teams with clear mandates; strong digital presences and data-informed strategies; active participation at trade shows; and a disciplined shift from generic destination advertising to layered, niche destination storytelling. The cautionary tale is provided by Saldanha Bay, where governance failures caused the complete collapse of a once-functional tourism office, leaving businesses to operate on isolated islands with no collective voice, no coherent brand, and no connection to provincial marketing platforms. The key lesson for the Overstrand is that the structure of tourism governance matters enormously: well-designed public-private partnerships consistently outperform purely in-house models in agility, market effectiveness, and private sector trust.
The Overstrand Tourism Office: Internal Perspectives
Interviews with the Overstrand Tourism Office staff and with the Municipal Manager illuminate the institutional landscape from the inside. The tourism office is staffed by a single permanent employee (all other officers are on rolling temporary contracts) and has been operating without a Tourism Manager since that post was deliberately left vacant pending the finalisation of a long-term tourism strategy. A draft of that strategy has languished unsigned for over three years.
The tourism function was absorbed into the Planning and Development directorate following the dissolution of the LED department, a structural transition that has left tourism without a permanent institutional home, adrift between municipal pillars, and overwhelmed by administrative and procurement obligations that crowd out any proactive marketing or business engagement. The loss of the established “Cape Whale Coast” brand in favour of a corporate “Overstrand Tourism” identity has eroded market equity without building a coherent replacement. The Municipal Manager is candid about these constraints, attributing the absence of independent tourism structures partly to the operational disruption caused by MFMA Circular 131 and partly to the decision to hold the Tourism Manager vacancy until a strategy is in place. He articulates a clear vision of the municipality’s appropriate role of creating a conducive environment rather than operating tourism directly, and identifies concrete next steps: understanding Overstrand’s tourism economy, regional benchmarking and capitalising on public-private infrastructure co-funding mechanisms. What emerges from both sets of interviews is a tourism function that is institutionally under-resourced, strategically adrift, and urgently in need of both structural clarity and political will to move forward.
Survey Results: Tourism Businesses, Non-Tourism Businesses, and Residents
Three large-scale online surveys canvassed the views of 183 tourism businesses, 73 non-tourism businesses, and 1 450 residents, providing robust quantitative validation of the qualitative findings and extending the evidence base across the full Overstrand community. Among tourism businesses, confidence in the five-year outlook is high (65% are confident or very confident), but this optimism is tempered by clear frustration with marketing effectiveness. Nearly 40% rate current destination marketing as ineffective or very ineffective and by shared concerns about water supply constraints, load-shedding, tourism signage, and housing affordability as a labour-market constraint.
The strategic priority most strongly endorsed by tourism businesses is extending the tourist season beyond whale season, followed by promoting the Overstrand as a year-round food and wine destination. The non-tourism business survey confirms that even firms with no direct dependency on visitors are shaped by tourism cycles through the broader local economy, and that the sector’s primary demands are improved public safety, dedicated economic development support, and affordable staff housing. This conveys a strong signal that the community expects a more balanced development agenda. The resident survey, drawing on the most established and geographically diverse sample, delivers perhaps the clearest strategic mandate of all. Residents are not anti-tourism: 66% believe the benefits of tourism outweigh the negatives, 80% recognise its role in job creation, and the general atmosphere during the tourism season is rated positively by 73%. Indeed, over 90% of respondents host visiting friends and relatives during the year with two thirds hosting visitors over the busy Christmas and Easter period. Residents are a tourism positive as they become accommodation providers, hosts and tour guides during the season, however, their visitors do contribute negatively to traffic congestion and stress on scarce resources. But residents are unambiguous about the conditions attached to their support: traffic and infrastructure must keep pace with growth, the environment must be protected, the economic benefits must be distributed more equitably across towns and communities, and tourism must be managed rather than merely promoted. The dominant growth preference is careful expansion with strong management, not aggressive volume growth. Across all three surveys, the desire to diversify beyond whale season, improve signage, and ensure that Stanford, Gansbaai, and Kleinmond receive equitable attention and investment runs as a consistent thread.
Concluding Remarks and the Path Forward
The evidence assembled across this study points towards a coherent and actionable set of priorities for the Overstrand Local Municipality. The foundational message is one of genuine strength: the municipality is widely acknowledged as one of the best-run in South Africa, its infrastructure and service delivery are exemplary by national standards, and its natural tourism assets (the ocean big five, world-class wine and gastronomy, spectacular fynbos, dramatic coastal scenery) are the envy of competing destinations. The challenge is not one of resource or reputation but of institutional organisation, strategic clarity, and deliberate investment in the enabling conditions for tourism to reach its potential.
Ten recommendations are presented to address this challenge. They centre on sustaining and extending the quality of service delivery and infrastructure that forms the bedrock of the visitor experience; developing a clear destination identity and professional marketing function capable of repositioning the Overstrand as a year-round, multi-attraction destination at national and international trade levels; modernising and repurposing the tourism offices around digital engagement and active business facilitation; appointing a dedicated tourism bridge person to connect municipal processes with private sector needs; establishing a local hospitality skills database and training pipeline to address chronic staffing shortages; resolving the macro and micro signage crisis that currently undermines both brand coherence and business accessibility; tackling dedicated tour bus parking in Hermanus; and ensuring that the tourism development dividend is distributed equitably across all Overstrand towns. Taken together, these recommendations constitute a foundation for a forward-looking tourism policy that is evidence-based, community-endorsed, and fit for the competitive landscape of the decade ahead.
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This study set out to investigate how the Overstrand Local Municipality can most effectively fulfil its role in supporting, enabling, and governing the tourism economy on which so much of its civic and commercial life depends. It has done so through a wide-ranging and methodologically diverse evidence base: a review of international and South African policy frameworks; a quantitative analysis of the Overstrand tourism economy benchmarked against comparable municipalities; 46 face-to-face interviews with tourism businesses and local government officials; comparative interviews with four Western Cape tourism offices and the provincial Department of Economic Development and Tourism; three large-scale surveys canvassing 183 tourism businesses, 73 non-tourism businesses, and 1 450 residents; and a synthesis of the two most recent secondary documents situating the Overstrand within its regional economic context.
The evidence assembled across these sources points consistently in the same direction. The Overstrand is not a destination struggling with inadequate assets, a weak visitor base, or a failing economy. It is a destination of exceptional natural and cultural endowment, with a well-run municipal platform, a recovering and increasingly confident business community, and a resident population that is broadly and generously supportive of tourism’s continued development. The challenge it faces is not one of resource poverty – it is one of institutional organisation, strategic clarity, and deliberate investment in the enabling conditions that would allow its existing strengths to be fully converted into sustained economic performance.
Ten recommendations emerge from the totality of this evidence. They are presented not as an exhaustive action plan but as the ten most consequential interventions the municipality could make in the period ahead, those where the case is strongest, the need most urgent, and the potential return most significant.
Recommendation 1: Sustain and Extend the Foundation of Service Delivery and Infrastructure
The Overstrand Municipality’s most important tourism asset is not a whale, a wine valley, or a UNESCO accreditation. It is its reputation as one of the best-run local governments in South Africa. Across the interviews, the surveys, and the comparative benchmarking, one finding recurs with remarkable consistency: visitors and businesses alike cite the quality of the Overstrand’s basic service delivery, its infrastructure maintenance, street cleanliness, waste collection, and visible security, as a primary reason why the destination feels premium relative to alternatives. This is not a given. It is the product of consistent institutional discipline, and it must be actively maintained.
At the same time, the research identifies specific infrastructure gaps that have become material constraints on tourism competitiveness. Water supply and electricity reliability are rated as high or severe operational pressures by more than 40% of tourism businesses. Roads and traffic management divide the resident community almost evenly between satisfied and dissatisfied. Public ablution facilities are rated inadequate by more than 40% of residents. Tour bus parking in the Hermanus CBD remains unresolved after many years of discussion. These are not aspirational improvements – they are the pre-competitive baseline requirements on which destination quality depends. Addressing them is the single most important signal the municipality can send to both its business community and its visitor market that it takes its stewardship role seriously.
Recommendation 2: Resolve the Signage Crisis at Both Macro and Micro Scale
Tourism signage in the Overstrand is rated as inadequate or very inadequate by nearly a third of tourism businesses, the weakest service dimension in the entire survey. The research reveals that the signage problem operates at two distinct but equally damaging levels.
At the macro scale, there is no consistent regional identity in the physical landscape. Visitors travelling through the Overstrand encounter a confusing array of names – Overstrand, Overberg, Whale Coast, Hermanus – rendered in inconsistent formats, faded colours, and varying sizes. There is no prominent arrival signage welcoming visitors to Hermanus at either town approach. The Hermanus Wine Route has no directional signage. The double UNESCO accreditation – the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve and the Creative City of Gastronomy – is absent from most physical signage and most promotional material, representing a failure to leverage what are, in global destination marketing terms, exceptionally credible credentials.
At the micro scale, individual businesses describe a bureaucratic process for obtaining tourism signage that is opaque, slow, and discouraging. One business that successfully navigated the full application process was informed that its approved sign would take six months to install, an interval that is, as the interviewee observed, wholly unacceptable for a functioning commercial enterprise. The municipality should undertake an urgent audit of both the physical signage network and the internal approval process, with the explicit objective of reducing approval-to-installation time, standardising the regional visual identity, and ensuring that every significant tourism asset and business node in the Overstrand is clearly and confidently signposted.
Recommendation 3: Build a Professional, Digital-First Destination Marketing Function
Destination marketing is the most consistently and most strongly criticised dimension of the municipality’s tourism function across every evidence source in this study. Nearly 40% of tourism businesses rate current destination marketing as ineffective or very ineffective. The municipality has no meaningful presence at the national or international trade shows where tour operators design itineraries twelve to eighteen months in advance. The “Overstrand” brand carries no emotional or geographic resonance for prospective visitors. And the destination’s narrative, in the limited marketing that does exist, remains almost entirely captive to whale watching, leaving the wine valley, the gastronomy offerings, the adventure and hiking product, the heritage towns, the art and the fynbos landscape effectively invisible to anyone who has not already arrived.
The benchmark offices profiled in this study: Visit Stellenbosch, Mossel Bay Tourism, and Plett Tourism, share a common marketing approach that is instructive: they have moved decisively from broad, generalised destination advertising to disciplined, niche-specific storytelling, backed by professional digital and social media capacity, active trade relationships, and data-informed campaign investment. Mossel Bay manages a social media community of nearly 100 000 followers through outsourced specialist management. Plett Tourism operates five dedicated niche websites. Neither of these outcomes requires a large budget – but they require a clear strategy and the professional capacity to execute it.
The Overstrand’s destination marketing function needs to be rebuilt around three pillars: a digital-first, narrative-driven brand strategy that communicates the full depth of the destination’s offer to clearly defined visitor segments; a professional social media and content management capability, whether in-house or outsourced; and an active trade presence at key national and international platforms, most urgently Cape Town’s WTM Africa, and the national Indaba where operators, travel agents, and media professionals make the itinerary decisions that will determine visitor flows for years to come. Attendance and visibility at WESGRO and DEDAT workshops is also key.
The urgency of this recommendation is sharpened by competitive dynamics that are already in motion. Mossel Bay and Plettenberg Bay are actively building marine and whale associations – events, sculptures and interpretation centres that could, over time, erode the distinctiveness of the Overstrand’s marine identity in the minds of visitors and tour operators who have not yet formed strong destination loyalties. The window in which the Overstrand can claim its natural positioning as the home of the ocean big five, the world’s most reliable land-based whale watching, shark cage diving and other marine interactions is narrowing. A professional destination marketing function, backed by a resolved brand identity and an active trade presence, is not merely a governance improvement. It is a competitive necessity.
Recommendation 4: Activate the UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy Accreditation
Of all the unrealised strategic assets identified in this research, the UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy accreditation stands out as the most immediately actionable and the most disproportionately neglected. It is a globally credible designation that places the Overstrand within a network of recognised culinary destinations spanning Parma, San Sebastián, Chengdu, and Ensenada. It speaks directly to the fastest-growing and highest-spending segment of international experiential travel. And it is almost entirely unknown, including, as the interview evidence reveals, to many of the food and wine businesses that would benefit most directly from its promotion.
Activating the accreditation does not require a large budget. It requires a decision to use it: to embed it in all marketing materials, signage, trade presentations, and press communications; to build a curated gastronomy itinerary that links the Hemel-en-Aarde and Stanford wine areas, the food culture, the Clarence Drive corridor, local seafood producers, and the regions artisan and restaurant scene into a coherent, marketable route; and to coordinate with Wesgro, DEDAT and SA Tourism to ensure the designation features in provincial and national destination marketing. Done well, this single initiative could do more to reposition the Overstrand as a year-round, high-yield destination than any volume-based marketing campaign.
Recommendation 5: Establish an Independent, Professionally Governed Destination Management Organisation
The comparative benchmarking at the heart of this study leads to one institutional conclusion above all others: the structure of tourism governance is a primary determinant of destination competitiveness, and the Overstrand’s current structure is not fit for the competitive environment it faces.
The tourism office function is currently managed by a single permanent employee, supported by staff on rolling temporary contracts, within a directorate whose primary mandate is planning and development. The Tourism Manager post is vacant. A draft strategy has remained unsigned for nearly five years. The tourism office has no independent governance, no diversified funding base, no professional marketing mandate, and no structural mechanism for meaningful private sector participation in destination direction-setting.
The model that this study’s benchmarking most clearly recommends is a semi-independent Destination Management Organisation (not merely marketing), governed by a public-private board with clear terms of reference, funded primarily by a municipal grant but supplemented by membership fees and project-based revenue, and staffed by a small, specialist professional team with an outward-facing marketing and business facilitation mandate. This structure is achievable within the constraints of MFMA Circular 131 through carefully designed tender specifications as Stellenbosch, Mossel Bay, and Plettenberg Bay have each demonstrated. It does not require the municipality to relinquish accountability or oversight; it requires it to create the conditions in which a professional tourism body can operate with the agility and private sector trust that a purely in-house model cannot generate.
Recommendation 6: Appoint a Dedicated Tourism Bridge Person
Across the interview evidence, one need is expressed with greater frequency and greater frustration than almost any other: the absence of a dedicated, accessible, human point of contact between the municipality’s processes and the private sector’s needs. The role that interviewees describe – variously called a “bridge person,” a “go-to,” a “liaison,” and a “champion” – is not a senior strategic position. It is a relationship role: someone who knows the businesses, understands the municipal systems, can navigate the bureaucracy on behalf of operators, flags emerging issues to management, and communicates proactively rather than reactively.
The Municipal Manager himself acknowledges the gap directly: “They want a go-to and that gap is felt.” This is among the most straightforward of the ten recommendations to act on. It does not require a governance restructure or a strategy sign-off. It requires the political will to formalise and fill a function that has been missing since the departure of the last tourism liaison, and to resource it with the operational latitude and business-community access that the role demands.
Recommendation 7: Build a Local Hospitality Skills Pipeline
Staffing is the single most consistently cited operational challenge across the tourism business interview sample. Businesses of every category: accommodation, restaurants, wine farms, attractions, adventure operators, report difficulty finding locally based candidates with the training and experience required for management and specialised hospitality roles. The consequence is that management-level staff are routinely sourced from Cape Town, at higher cost and with no local community benefit. In a municipality with high unemployment, this represents a significant and persistent market failure.
The solution does not require a new institution. The MERO confirms that 21 learners each from Hermanus and Gansbaai have already been recruited into hospitality-related skills development programmes – which is proof that the partnerships and community appetite for this kind of investment exist. What is needed is scale, coordination, and communication. The municipality should work with local further education institutions, established hospitality businesses, and provincial skills development agencies to design a structured local training pipeline, linked to a centralised database of locally available hospitality candidates that businesses can access directly. The Municipal Manager notes that such a database already exists in partial form within municipal systems but that businesses are not aware of it or engaging with it. Closing this awareness gap is itself an immediate priority.
Recommendation 8: Develop a Coordinated Events Strategy for the Full Overstrand Calendar
Events are the most powerful available tool for extending the tourist season, generating off-peak demand, and distributing visitor footfall beyond the Hermanus CBD and beyond the October whale season peak. The evidence for this is clear and consistent. The Hermanus Whale Festival generated an estimated R90 million in visitor spend in 2025. Stanford in Bloom sold 19 560 tickets. Plett Tourism grew its annual events calendar from 11 events in 2013 to 145 by 2025, demonstrably extending average visitor stay from 2.75 to 3.5 nights in the process.
The Overstrand has the raw ingredients for an equally compelling events programme, but presently they are uncoordinated, under-promoted, and disconnected from a coherent seasonal strategy. More than half of resident survey respondents identify developing more off-season events as the single most important measure for improving the tourism-resident relationship. More than 40% of tourism businesses call for more diverse event types, earlier advance promotion, and stronger coordination with local businesses.
The municipality should commission the development of a formal annual events calendar for the full Overstrand geography, structured deliberately to spread programming across the year and across all towns. This calendar should be published well in advance, shared proactively with all accommodation businesses so that advance booking can be maximised, and used as the primary vehicle for communicating the destination’s year-round appeal to both domestic and international trade partners.
This strategy must also address the current ambivalence that surrounds the Overstrand’s most important event. The Hermanus Whale Festival is indispensable – its R90 million visitor spend and 85 000 attendees in 2025 (Hermanus Whale Festival 2025 Feedback and Impact Report) anchor the entire tourism calendar – but the business community’s evidence is clear that it needs to be refreshed: broadened in its local business inclusion, more carefully managed in terms of parking and access during setup and breakdown, and progressively repositioned to attract the nature-focused, higher-spending visitor that the destination’s premium offering demands. A coordinated events strategy is the appropriate vehicle for this reimagining – not as a challenge to the Festival’s primacy, but as the framework within which it can evolve alongside a growing calendar of complementary events that distribute economic benefit more equitably across the year, across the geography, and across the full business community.
Recommendation 9: Address Geographic Inequity in Tourism Investment and Marketing
The sense of marginalisation felt by businesses and residents in Stanford, Gansbaai, Hangklip-Kleinmond, and the smaller outlying settlements is one of the most persistent and emotionally resonant themes in this study. It surfaces in the interviews, in the survey open-ended responses, in the resident data, and in the comparative marketing analysis. The concern is not that these towns lack tourism merit – as in several cases they have distinctive and genuinely world-class assets. It is that they are effectively invisible in the Overstrand’s marketing narrative, under-represented in the tourism office’s operational attention, and increasingly anxious that the municipality’s frame of reference begins and ends at the Hermanus CBD.
The recommendation is straightforward but requires deliberate commitment: every significant tourism policy decision, marketing investment, product development initiative, and infrastructure improvement should be assessed explicitly against its geographic distribution of benefit. The destination management structure recommended above should have explicit representation from each major node. Marketing budgets should reflect the geographic spread of the destination’s offer. And the tourism strategy that the municipality is now positioned to finalise should contain a specific and measurable commitment to equitable investment across all Overstrand towns.
Stanford offers the clearest proof of concept for what targeted investment in a non-Hermanus node can achieve. The Stanford in Bloom festival – developed from a community and business initiative linked to the Chelsea Flower Show’s South African fynbos exhibit – sold 19 560 tickets in 2025, generated both temporary and permanent local employment, and has given Stanford a coherent and distinctive identity as a green, fynbos-focused, heritage and gastronomy destination. It runs for two weeks outside the school holiday window, introducing a new commercial season at a time when the coastal towns are not yet at their peak. This was achieved without significant municipal marketing investment. With it, Stanford’s potential as a year-round, high-quality destination node is complementary and rather than competing with the marine offerings of Hermanus and Gansbaai it could be substantially greater. The same logic applies to the emerging fynbos programming in Kleinmond and around Fernkloof, and to the marine-heritage and seafood identity that Gansbaai is capable of building if its cliff path and harbour is rehabilitated and its broader product is invested in seriously.
Recommendation 10: Reposition the Overstrand as a Year-Round, Multi-Attraction Destination
All nine preceding recommendations are, in a sense, instrumental to this tenth and most encompassing one. The Overstrand’s most significant strategic vulnerability is its continued dependence on a single seasonal attraction of whale watching as the primary driver of its destination identity and its visitor economy. The risks of this dependence have been documented at length in this study. The contraction of Gansbaai’s shark cage diving sector over a decade following adverse species press, is not a cautionary tale from a distant destination. It happened within, and it illustrates with painful clarity what happens when a community’s tourism economy is built on a single natural phenomenon that is beyond its control.
The strategic reorientation required is not a rejection of whale watching – as it remains the most powerful hook the Overstrand has for initial international awareness. It is a deliberate broadening of the destination’s narrative and product offerings, so that visitors who come for the whales stay for the wine, return for the gastronomy, bring their families for the beaches and the fynbos, and recommend the Overstrand to friends looking for an adventure or a festival or a slow-travel escape. The assets to build this narrative already exist. The Hemel-en-Aarde Valley produces wine of international standard. The Stanford heritage and food scene is distinctive and genuinely special. The Overstrand coastline from Pringle Bay to Pearly Beach is among the most spectacular in the country. The Kogelberg Biosphere is a biodiversity asset of global significance. The UNESCO gastronomy credential connects the destination to a global community of culinary tourism.
Underpinning all of this is a natural narrative that the Overstrand has not yet fully claimed: the convergence of the ocean big five and the fynbos floral kingdom in a single, compact, accessible destination. No competitor in South Africa (and very few in the world) can offer visitors the experience of watching whales from a cliff path that runs adjacent to a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, followed by a meal at a restaurant in a Creative City of Gastronomy, followed by a wine tasting in a valley that produces bottles served in restaurants in Paris and New York. The ingredients for a world-class, year-round destination narrative are not aspirational. They are already here. What has been missing is the institutional will and the marketing capacity to tell that story coherently, consistently, and to the audiences who are most likely to respond to it. Closing that gap is ultimately what this report is about.
What has been missing is not the product but the will and the institutional capacity to package, promote, and sustain a more ambitious and diversified destination narrative. This study has set out to provide the evidence base and the comparative benchmarking on which that ambition can be grounded. The recommendations above provide the framework through which it can be acted on. What they require, above all, is a decision by the Overstrand Local Municipality to match the quality of its natural assets and its service delivery with a tourism governance model that is equal to the opportunity those assets represent.
Conclusion
The Overstrand stands at a genuine inflection point. It has the assets, the civic platform, and the community support to become one of the most compelling and best-managed tourism destinations in South Africa. What it has lacked, for long enough that the gap has become strategically significant, is the institutional structure, the marketing capacity, and the strategic direction required to make that potential a sustained reality.
The ten recommendations presented in this chapter are not a wish list. They are evidence-based, community-endorsed, benchmarked against the practices of comparable destinations, and calibrated to the legal and institutional constraints within which the Overstrand Municipality operates. Several can be acted on immediately and at low cost. Others require structural decisions that will take longer to implement but that, once made, will fundamentally change the trajectory of the destination. None is beyond the reach of a municipality with the Overstrand’s track record, resources, and reputation.
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