I sat on a panel at WTM Africa this week titled “Skills 2030: The Tourism Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet But Should.” It is a provocative title and it sparked a conversation I want to be honest about, because I don’t think we say it loudly enough in this industry. We are not ready.

South Africa’s tourism sector contributes nine percent to GDP. Two million jobs directly and indirectly. Eleven million arrivals in 2025. Seventy five percent of those from the African continent itself. By any measure this is a sector of enormous consequence to this country. Yet when I look at how we are preparing our people for the next four years I find myself genuinely concerned.

Three weeks ago I was at ITB in Berlin. I stayed at a full service, deluxe, 220 bedroom Courtyard by Marriott in the heart of the city. I asked how many permanent staff they employed. Eleven. Eleven permanent people running that entire property. They outsource maintenance. They outsource aspects of housekeeping. They have had absolutely no choice but to completely reimagine what a hotel operation looks like because Europe is in the grip of an acute staffing shortage that forces their hand every single day.

Now come back to South Africa. We have a steady labour supply. Relatively low minimum wages. A hospitality industry that frankly remains pretty poor paying in proportion to other sectors. Because of all of that we have not been forced to adapt the way our European counterparts have been forced to adapt. We have been comfortable. That comfort is building a skills crisis beneath the surface that is going to catch a lot of us off guard.

Our hotel schools, learnerships and many accredited institutions are doing what they have done for the last twenty years. Producing a steady supply of waiters, receptionists and barmen. I am not dismissing those roles. For 2030 we need something different though. We need people who are hybrid, technical and human simultaneously. People with soft skills, genuine commercial understanding and leadership capability. As an industry we are guilty. Guilty of not adopting, not training and not investing nearly enough in the futures of the young people coming through our ranks.

So what does 2030 actually look like in terms of the roles we need to prepare for in hospitality?

I don’t believe every hotel needs a permanent AI specialist sitting on their payroll. What I do believe is that AI consultancies are going to do very well indeed contracting with hotels, independents and BnBs, coming in and conducting proper AI audits. Taking honest stock of where a business actually is versus where it thinks it is. Most of us would be quite frightened by what that audit reveals.

The second role I think is coming whether we are ready for it or not is the sustainability manager at hotel level, or at least on a nodal level. The EU compliance requirements are already knocking on the door of any operator who wants the big European tour operators sending business their way. Dedicated sustainability roles embedded in our properties are coming. People working across community engagement, water and electricity management, feeding back into the grid, bridging the gap between the business and the environment it operates in. That is a real job and a critically important job. Right now we are training nobody for it.

Here is the thing I feel most strongly about though. We have created a generation of office jockey General Managers. Our GMs are drowning in data that needs to be engineered, analysed, compiled and sent upward through layers of corporate reporting. It is keeping brilliant, passionate, hospitality-born people trapped behind desks when they should be out on the floor.

“Management by Walking Around”, which should be the most fundamental instinct of any hotelier, has been slowly strangled by administrative burden that technology should already be handling for us. By 2030 there will be no excuse. The data engineering, the reporting, the analysis is by and large automated. When that happens our General Managers get to go back to doing what they came into this industry to do.

That is what 2030 looks like to me. Not robots replacing people. A General Manager back in the lobby where they belong.

Guy Stehlik is the Founder and CEO of BON Hotels and spoke on the panel “Skills 2030: The Tourism Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet But Should” at the WTM Africa 2026 Future Stage in Cape Town.

When news broke that Hilton had exited its Durban property, nobody in the industry was particularly surprised. I’ve been watching that building and that node for a long time, and the pressures were visible. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating and damaging.

What struck me wasn’t the exit itself. It was the ownership history. This is the same group that parted ways with the Hyatt in Rosebank – a hotel I personally opened back in 1996 – and other operators elsewhere.

As always, there are two sides to every story. International operators won’t unpack disputes around contractual capital expenditure, owner interference, lack of governance or unmet funding obligations in the media. They protect the brand and move forward. Owners won’t publish their version either. What the public sees is the ending, not the years of tension, disputes and commercial pressure that possibly preceded it.

But when the same ownership group has repeatedly parted ways with major international operators, it stops feeling like isolated disagreements and starts looking like a pattern. And destructive patterns should ideally warrant more than a collective shrug from the industry.

So yes, Durban will navigate this. The city’s hospitality fundamentals remain intact. The property will likely continue operating under a different flag. Location was clearly part of the challenge here. Durban’s hospitality geography has been shifting north for years, and business demand has followed infrastructure, mixed-use development and perceived stability. We operate successfully in those northern nodes ourselves, and the fundamentals there are strong.

But the exit has surfaced a much bigger issue that extends well beyond one property or one city. It has brought into sharp focus the question of ownership accountability and the trail of disruption that certain owners leave behind without consequence.

When a large hotel in a key node becomes destabilised, the impact spreads quickly and widely. Conference organisers hesitate. Corporate travel buyers reassess risk. Suppliers lose contracts. Staff face uncertainty. Municipalities see their rates base erode. What we are really talking about is a trail of destruction that extends well beyond boardroom disputes.

Even if we acknowledge that operators may have in some way contributed to these owners’ decisions to mothball their hotels and kick international operators into touch, it is astonishing to see those same owners trading under their house brand and simply moving on to the next property.

And yet, we rarely say any of this out loud.

We don’t talk enough about the structural imbalance that exists once owner operator relationships deteriorate. At this level, owners are often extremely well-resourced individuals or family offices. They control the asset and capital decisions. When disputes arise, they can afford to dig in. I have seen so many situations where what should have been straightforward arbitration turns into something resembling Stalingrad tactics, where every step is contested, every process delayed and every avenue stretched for time. Time becomes strategy. And operators, who have staff to protect and guests to serve, are rarely in a position to match that kind of endurance.

From the operator’s side, it feels like managing through fog. You continue running the hotel, protecting staff and shielding the guest experience, while the commercial disagreement drags on behind the scenes, sometimes for years. Or the operator, their staff and their creditors, are on the street with no realistic redress opportunity.

This isn’t about painting all owners with the same brush. Many of the strongest partnerships in our sector are built on mutual respect, and those relationships are what this industry is built on. But when a hotel owner has effectively unlimited resources to prolong a fight and a documented history of leaving operators behind, we should be asking harder questions before the next contract is signed.

Operators share responsibility here too. We are meticulous when assessing a building. We interrogate feasibility studies, rate projections and market demand until the numbers are airtight. Yet historically, far less attention has been paid to the behavioural track record of the owner sitting across the table. I have personally under-estimated this over the years and have – on a few occasions – ignored whispers from industry friends about the ethics of a particular hotel owner. This has cost me dearly.

Understanding how an owner has handled previous operator relationships, how they approach capital obligations and how they behave when performance tightens is just as important as understanding RevPAR growth. Hospitality is a long-term business requiring patient capital, operational discipline and, above all, partnership between owner and operator. Without that alignment, even the strongest global brand will find itself exposed.

I opened the Hyatt Rosebank in 1996. Watching what subsequently happened to that property under this ownership group over the last few years was difficult. Watching it happen again in Durban and Cape Town is worse, because it was entirely predictable.

Perhaps the real takeaway is not about one brand leaving one building. To me, it’s actually about whether we, as operators, are prepared to do the hard work of proper owner diligence and make it a prerequisite to signing deals, so that owners are held accountable when patterns of disruption emerge.

In our business the human being you choose to partner with often matters just as much as the agreement you eventually sign.

I was really pleased to see tourism given real weight at Davos this year. Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille stood on that stage and made a clear case that tourism should be treated as a serious economic growth engine, alongside electricity, transport and mining. For an industry that employs millions and sustains entire local economies, that recognition is highly appropriate and priceless.

When she led with Club Med SA, I totally got it. A R2.5 billion resort with a global hospitality brand behind it is the kind of story that travels well in investor circles. It shows confidence. And crucially, this wasn’t another deal dressed up as “international”. There was real foreign capital in the mix, alongside the IDC and local partners, and that’s what makes it stand out.

I only really paused when the conversation moved straight from Club Med to the idea of rolling out similar developments across the country. On paper, it sounds doable. But once you’ve spent time in this industry, you know those two ideas aren’t as aligned as they first appear. As a signal to investors, Club Med was the right example. As a blueprint for geographic spread, it’s a far more complicated proposition – the actual elephant in the room.

Club Med hasn’t landed just anywhere. It’s ended up in one of the few places in South Africa where its operating model genuinely makes sense. The KwaZulu-Natal north coast offers beach access, a workable climate, available land and the benefit of Durban’s northward expansion. It also allows the resort to connect directly to a Big Five safari experience in northern KwaZulu-Natal. That combination is rare, and it doesn’t really exist elsewhere at the scale this project needs.

The hospitality model itself is equally specific. Everything is all-inclusive and tightly programmed. Guests stay inside the resort because there’s no real need to leave. I’ve seen this first-hand at their Mauritius property. Families and children sit at the centre of the Club Med offer, management and staff rotate internationally, and the guests’ day is structured from morning through to the night. It works well in island-style leisure environments. But once you understand how the model operates, it’s hard to imagine simply lifting it and dropping it into the Drakensberg, near the Kruger Park, the Garden Route or a regional town and expecting the same results.

And for me, this is precisely why the question isn’t about replicating Club Med at all. It’s about being honest about the conditions that made it possible in the first place.

Hospitality investment itself isn’t the problem. It’s happening. Cape Town’s skyline tells you that much. The problem is where it’s happening. Outside Cape Town and a few established leisure hubs, development has slowed right down to a trickle. So, if geographic spread is genuinely the ambition, then using a highly specific, premium resort as the reference point starts to muddy the message.

What also tends to get lost in the Club Med story is how much had to be made to “happen” before the resort could even be built. The investor and its development partners didn’t just arrive at a site where bulk infrastructure was neatly in place. They carried the risk of getting it there, let alone the risks down the line relating to the infamous KZN service delivery issues relating to water, sanitation, electricity and other municipal matters, which matter when we start talking about replication.

If the expectation is that international hospitality investors are being asked to do more than just build and operate hotels, if they’re also being asked to step in where basic infrastructure falls short, then that needs to be said upfront. That’s not a criticism, as it’s simply how commercial decisions get made. Investors need to understand exactly what they’re being invited into.

This is where the difference between a Davos pitch and an investable proposition really shows. Investors don’t need inspiration, even when a project like Club Med is genuinely impressive. They need hard detail. They want to know what incentives exist outside established metros, what tax breaks apply in tourism growth corridors, what concessions are available and where government responsibility ends, and investor responsibility begins. Without that level of honesty, capital will keep going where it always goes, to places where infrastructure already works, and risk is easier to price.

There are a few other realities we need to be honest about, too. BEE structures come up again and again as a hurdle for international operators and investors looking at South Africa. That’s not to dismiss transformation. In the Club Med deal, the IDC pushed hard to make sure meaningful participation was built in through a BEE consortium, which demonstrates that it can be done.

The bigger issue is whether our current frameworks make it easier for investment to happen, or whether they end up adding layers of complexity without unlocking real growth. From where many operators sit, it often feels like the latter.

The same applies to skills and work permits. South African hospitality expertise is leaving for cruise ships and Middle Eastern markets, while our hotel schools are not producing the necessary conveyor belt of trained students and potential leadership at any pace and certainly not at the pace development requires. International operators bringing in their experienced “opening” teams to establish standards and train local staff should not face the outrageously difficult permit obstacles they currently do. Building local capacity is about sequencing. You bring in experience first, you transfer skills properly, and over time you localise leadership. Doing it the other way around rarely works.

I’ll be watching Club Med’s opening in July with interest. Not because I doubt it will succeed, but because it will tell us a lot about how investable South Africa really is once the ribbon-cutting is over and we are a few years down the line.

How staffing, localisation, infrastructure, approvals and partnerships play out in practice will be the real test. The planned 500-seat convention centre is interesting too. It suggests an understanding that long-term viability depends on more than leisure demand and peak seasons. Hotels survive on consistent, weekday business, not just great weekends or tourism seasons.

Club Med was the right example to take to Davos. As a signal, it worked. But if geographic spread is the real ambition, the conversation now must move away from examples and towards packaging hospitality-related investment benefits and incentives, focused on both the South African and local hospitality developers developing for South Africans and the international hospitality investment community.

Tourism investment doesn’t spread because one project looks good on a global stage. It spreads when the conditions are right for different kinds of projects to work in different places – this is what will unlock growth beyond Cape Town and a handful of luxury enclaves.

And if the Davos pitch is going to turn into real projects over the next few years, that’s where Patricia de Lille, collaborating with her fellow ministers, should focus on now.