Cape Town Spends R12m to Lure Tourists Back to 'Greatest City on Earth'

Cape Town is ploughing R12m into a global campaign aimed at bringing back tourists scared away by "Day Zero" doom-mongering.

The "Nowhere Better" campaign will focus on the key tourism markets of the US‚ UK and Germany‚ according to a report that will be presented to Thursday's meeting of the Cape Town city council.

"This industry is vulnerable to key shocks such as the water crisis and the accompanying negative imagery that was propagated by international media‚" says the report.

It said this imagery "definitely had an impact in making Cape Town a less desirable international tourist destination".

The city council is contributing R3m to the campaign‚ with the rest coming from tourism and trade promotion agency Wesgro‚ Cape Town Tourism‚ and the Tourism Business Council of SA.

Tourism directly employs 206‚000 people in the Western Cape and pumps R39bn a year into the provincial economy.

"The campaign will help in protecting the industry‚ as getting back on to the international radar for tourism is extremely difficult once a destination loses its edge‚" the report tells councillors.

For the sixth successive year‚ readers of the Telegraph in the UK recently voted Cape Town the greatest city on Earth.