SA, already reeling thanks to the global financial disaster, could wind up taking a much bigger bath if projections for foreign attendance at this summer’s World Cup prove correct. The month-long football contest, which SA won the inherent right to host in 2004, was anticipated to contribute as much as $11 bill to the battered economy — with foreign tourism accounting for 16% of that figure. But less than 3 weeks before the June eleven opening match between Mexico and South Africa, organizers have revised their guesstimates for the number of World Cup visitors down to two hundred thousand from an original figure of 750,000. That might leave the states’s refurbished airfields and cleaned-up towns empty.
As a consequence, airlines and hostels are slashing costs and some government-owned corporations have purchased thousands of unclaimed tickets — at taxpayer cost — to give away to workers or as prizes in the hope of filling almost all of the 3.2 million seats available at the 64 World Cup matches.
Contest officers didn’t give reasons for revising their once-optimistic tourism goals but the poor economy internationally yarns about inflated costs in SA and the country’s high crime rate — that the English paper The Observer announced included fifty murders a day — are likely factors. The stiff Internet-based ticket system used by FIFA, the federation that manages world football as well as the cup, has also been blamed. Soccer-mad Nigeria, for example, which may have a team in the competition, had brought just seven hundred tickets to the cup as late as 2 months back, the Observer claims, while FIFA asserts African countries outside of the host country had acquired just forty thousand — not enough to fill one stadium for one match.
Web penetration is much lower in Africa than in the U. S. , where eighty thousand World Cup tickets were acquired.