Measuring the competitiveness of South Africa as a tourist destination

Berendien Lubbe is Head of the Division: Tourism Management at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She specialises in air transport and tourism and corporate travel management. She is a National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated scientist in South Africa and has published her work in accredited international journals and also presented at numerous international conferences. Felicite Fairer-Wessels is an associate professor in the Division: Tourism Management at the University of Pretoria. She specialises in ecotourism and attractions and events. She holds degrees in information sciences and has published on the role of information in various tourism contexts. Anneli Douglas is a senior lecturer in the Division: Tourism Management at the University of Pretoria. She specialises in business and corporate travel and ICTs. She holds a Ph.D. in Tourism Management and has lectured at Tertiary institutions since 2005. Her research has been published in internationally accredited journals, and she has delivered papers at international academic conferences. Elizabeth Kruger is a Ph.D. graduate of the Division Tourism Management at the University of Pretoria, lecturing at under and post graduate levels. Areas of research interest include sports tourism and destination marketing. Her doctoral study focused on the issue of environmentally responsible behaviour of sport event spectators.Oral Presentatio

A ray of sunshine in the COVID‑19 environment, with a virtual sunburst elective

No Abstrac

Ornamental bulb crops as sources of medicinal and industrial natural products

Plants produce many diverse chemical compounds that are used in various industries. The aim of this thesis was to obtain an understanding of what is needed to convert an ornamental crop to a pharmaceutical crop. This included knowledge about regulatory issues and expectations from the industry regarding quality and safety of such crops. Based on this knowledge, a further aim was to determine how the cultivation practices of the model ornamental crop Narcissus pseudonarcissus, which contains the medicinal compound galanthamine, needed to be adapted. Some key points in the cultivation process were identified that may need to be adapted in the production of Narcissus bulbs as raw material for the pharmaceutical industry. These points were investigated in field experiments using NMR-based metabolomics as the main analytical tool. This contributed to a validated production chain of Narcissus pseudonarcissus bulbs suita ble for use as raw material for the extraction of galanthamine. Results from exploratory investigations into other ornamental bulb material for novel industrial products are also presented.UBL - phd migration 201

Increasing Student Employability through University/Industry Collaboration: A study in South Africa, the UK and Finland

Due to its high youth unemployment the study focused on South Africa but covered selected universities in the UK and Finland for the purposes of comparison and benchmarking. The purpose of the study was to determine the perceptions of industry, lecturers and students on the competencies gained at university and the benefits of university enterprise collaboration (UEC) to students. Data was collected through mixed methods: a structured survey and semi-structured interviews. UEC is shown to increase student employability and work-readiness but several challenges to implementing such collaboration exist, particularly in South Africa. Based on the results the paper proposes that technology can be used to overcome the gaps in achieving effective UEC and thereby increasing the employability of students in South Africa

Regional competitiveness: an emerging domestic market segment perspective

Regional competitiveness and domestic tourism is increasingly important for a sustainable tourism economy at national level. The development of a competitive provincial index for the South African emerging domestic market is under scrutiny/investigation. Provincial competitiveness is a province’s ability to optimize its attractiveness for domestic tourists by offering quality, innovative and attractive tourism services to gain domestic market share, while ensuring that available resources supporting tourism are used efficiently and in a sustainable way. Competitiveness at provincial level will ultimately result in national competitiveness as issues of supply are addressed (at local level). Factors and indicators relevant to selected regions/provinces/destinations are empirically identified through focus groups and a sample of 1065 emerging tourists in eight provinces of South Africa. A Tourism and Travel Market Indicators Index consisting of nine validated factors are proposed that can be used to compare the competitiveness of regions based on factors most relevant to the domestic market

ICT INVESTMENT EFFECTIVENESS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POST OFFICE: RECONSIDERING THE APPROACHES OF THE PAST 20 YEARS

Organisations have invested and continue to invest considerable resources in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Much of this investment is made on the basis of guarantee than an expected return will occur. This study presents the results of an empirical study of the impact of ICT investment on performance at the South African Post office (SAPO). Six years of historical data, from 2005 to 2010, were obtained from the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the SAPO and analysed. This included appropriate IT data and financial data from the organisation’s financial statements and balance sheet. ICT investments were tested against financial performance indicators such as return on ICT investment, operating leverage, turnover growth, net profit, organisational risk, IT cost efficiency ratio and IT efficiency ratio. Within the period studied, it was observed that ICT investments at SAPO were negatively correlated with most of the financial indicators such as return on ICT investment, operating leverage, turn-over growth, net profit, organisational risk and IT efficiency ratio. This study therefore suggests that ICT investments at SAPO for the mentioned period did not have desirable impact on financial performance of the organisation. In order to realise tangible financial benefits of the ICT investments at SAPO, the research results suggest that a longer period needs to be considered, and should also include like non-technological determinants such as competence and experience levels of IT personnel, alignment of IT strategy with business strategy and business process re-engineering to suit new systems needs to be considered too prior to making any investments in ICT

Matching Tourism Supply and Demand: an analysis of how tourism products meet the needs of emerging domestic market segments in selected regions in South Africa

In this study a newly developed model, referred to as the “Match Model”, is used to express the relationship between the needs of specifically identified emerging tourist market segments and the existing tourism product offerings in selected regions. Each market segment is positioned to show the extent to which the current product offerings in a region, represented by sectors such as transport, accommodation, tours and attractions, meet the respective market segment’s needs. The model was applied to South Africa’s five emerging domestic travel market segments and four - prioritized (?) regions. The value of the research lies in the development of a model which enables any permutation of –tourism product-market matchin

International educational tourism : does it foster global learning? A survey of South African high school learners

International educational tourism has the potential to foster global learning; however, very little empirical research exists to support this claim. This study responds to the growing demand in the literature for rigorous empirical research to test the underpinning assumption of IET. A global learning survey instrument is developed and completed by 1152 Grade 11 learners in 16 South African exclusive high schools. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that some types of IET are more conducive to global learning than others. Furthermore, for significant global learning to occur, educational tourism needs to be facilitated and cultural difference needs to be experienced. Personality traits that include curiosity, altruism, and being open-minded to new experiences, are identified as predictors of global learning, but the effect of school-based academic achievement is small. Additionally, through the synthesis of educational tourism, international education, experiential learning and global learning theories, the concept of IET is developed.University of Pretoriahttp://www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman2018-10-30hj2017Marketing ManagementTourism Managemen

Endogenous orienting modulates the Simon effect: critical factors in experimental design

Responses are faster when the side of stimulus and response correspond than when they do not correspond, even if stimulus location is irrelevant to the task at hand: the correspondence, spatial compatibility effect, or Simon effect. Generally, it is assumed that an automatically generated spatial code is responsible for this effect, but the precise mechanism underlying the formation of this code is still under dispute. Two major alternatives have been proposed: the referential-coding account, which can be subdivided into a static version and an attention-centered version, and the attention-shift account. These accounts hold clear-cut predictions for attentional cuing experiments. The former would assume a Simon effect irrespective of attentional cuing in its static version, whereas the attention-centered version of the referential-coding account and the attention-shift account would predict a decreased Simon effect on validly as opposed to invalidly cued trials. However, results from previous studies are equivocal to the effects of attentional cuing on the Simon effect. We argue here that attentional cueing reliably modulates the Simon effect if some crucial experimental conditions, mostly relevant for optimizing attentional allocation, are met. Furthermore, we propose that the Simon effect may be better understood within the perspective of supra-modal spatial attention, thereby providing an explanation for observed discrepancies in the literature