These are important points that have been highlighted in this article. South Africa's customer service is far below where it needs to be in order to make SA competitive with other global tourism destinations. The medical traveler consumes a variety of tourism services such as flights, accommodation, in-country travel by road, restaurants, leisure and cultural activities etc, and the experience at each of these will add up to their overall experience of SA far more than their experience at our healthcare facilities.

Yes the Service Levels and pricing etc are important and crucial factors! But that is not driving exponential growth in tourism - read visitors! Not from across the border but serious spenders and influential travelers. ut we need to target the foreign Sales Person who is doing the selling. Currently we typically rely on the easy pickings thus people who make their own travel arrangements - thus majority of Service Providers are Order Takers - that is NOT sales!

I have traveled a lot of the world and live in SA. I find our welcoming and incredible friendliness one of the biggest assets we have in SA for tourists. I am in tourism so I ask our guests and they feel the same. What part of the customer service chain is not good for travellers to or in SA. Where can we get stats talked about on customer service rating in SA? Are there particular areas we default here. Would be good to get better information sources so that as travel "hosts" we can improve ourselves.
Alan Roxton Wiggill Big Ky Ballooning and Geo Heritage Tours

I agree - South African's are welcoming and friendly on a whole. I think what's lacking is training "outside" of the tourism industry per say for example: supermarkets - some tellers don't even look at you. I lived in Japan for 3 years and something as simple as the people working there greeting me was a lovely value-add.