The city of Cape Town has been named Best City in Africa and the Middle East in the Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards for 2017.
Earlier in 2017, Cape Town was named the number one city in Africa for business tourism events by the International Congress and Convention Association, highlighting the diversity of what’s on offer in the city, from business to luxury travel, as well as affordable options for the leisure traveller.
Executive Mayor, City of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille comments: “We are ecstatic about the award affirming our status as a consistent destination of choice for travellers from all over the world. The City of Cape Town will continue to do all we can to promote Cape Town as the ideal place to live, work, play and invest in. Our tourism offering must be constantly refreshed so that we can keep people coming back for more. We will be getting on with the work along with our partners in the tourism and business tourism sectors to ensure that we put together innovative packages to keep the planes landing in Cape Town packed to capacity. Let us continue getting on with building a world class city so that we can grow our tourism economy and create even more jobs for the people of our beautiful city.”
Enver Duminy, CEO, Cape Town Tourism says: “We applaud the efforts of every tourism professional and every local who has worked tirelessly to make Cape Town a welcoming destination, renowned the world over as providing a fantastic travel experience. Let’s continue to add value to excellence, ensuring an ongoing boost to the economy and sustainability in employment in the sector for more Capetonians.” (via Bizcommunity)
Spire Property Management Launches Building Rescue Service
Spire Property Management has launched a building rescue service in order to assist commercial building owners bring their properties back to profitability. Sean Paul, executive director of Spire, explains that their building turnaround strategists assess why a building is not operating at its optimum levels and why things such as stubborn tenant vacancies exist.
“Our team do an intensive analyses of a building, assessing the tenant mix and reviewing the financial flow to ascertain why it is that a specific building needs an intervention and how to go about turning it around. We also conduct a benchmarking exercise to compare the building to others like itself,” he explains.
“Based on the outcomes of the analyses, we then prepare a comprehensive turnaround strategy for the building. Our team can be as involved in the implementation of the proposed solutions as the client wants them to be – or we can hand over the strategy to the owner for them to implement themselves,” says Paul.
Gregg Huntingford, CEO of Spire, explains that some of the aspects assessed cover poor trading densities, improved optimisation of space, utilisation of dead space – such as roof tops – implementing sustainable/green measures, an improved tenant mix and evaluating the evolution of a building over the years, taking the surrounding community into account as there is a strong link between the success of a building and how it delivers to the needs of its community.
Seedstars Heads to Tanzania
On 20 July 2017, 10 of Tanzania’s best seed stage startups will compete to represent the country at the Seedstars Summit and win up to USD 500 000 in equity investment.
The global seed-stage startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes is going to Tanzania for the 3rd time.
The companies selected to pitch at the Seedstars Dar el Salaam event need to be less than 2 years old, have raised less than USD 500,000 in funding and have built a minimum viable product, ideally with existing traction. The Seedstars World team is searching for one additional criterion – the startup’s regional and global scalability. Seedstars World is looking for smart startups that solve regional issues and develop profitable products for the global market, to support their regional businesses and growth.
Applications are still open, and startups can apply here: https://seedsta.rs/dar2017 by Thursday 13th of July. Attendees have to RSVP on the same link to attend the event.
