Transforming the South African tourism industry: The emerging black-owned bed and breakfast economy

In South Africa the tourism industry has been targeted as one of the key sectoral drivers for economic development and transformation of the country over the next two decades. A special feature of the South African tourism economy, which is a legacy of the apartheid period, is that the overwhelming majority of tourism enterprises and of the tourism economy as a whole is under the ownership of the white minority. With the post-apartheid transition, the national government recognizes that this unequal ownership structure in tourism needs to be addressed through a programme of transformation and consolidated support for the development of black owned tourism enterprises, especially of small tourism enterprises. The objective in this paper is to examine the problems and challenges that face the transformation of South Africa's contemporary tourism economy by investigating the development and constraints upon the country's emergent small black-owned accommodation sector in the form of bed and breakfast establishments.