SANParks CLOSURE IN SUPPORT OF LOCKDOWN

With respect to the media release that was placed under a brick on my patio regarding evacuating the park. First and foremost, we appreciate the actions taken by SANParks to support the nationwide lockdown as declared by our President. The manner that this public entity went about doing so is appalling and disgraceful. The letter is an unprofessional and unofficial document lacking in authoritative letterheads and grammar. We would believe that a matter of such importance would be communicated to the tourists to ensure that everybody understands the implications of the press release and in fact have the means to affect such evacuation. This State-owned entity prides itself on ‘responsible tourism’ in domestic tourism markets, but treats us as vagrants. The letter states that our health and well-being is of critical importance – an absolute disregard I would say. We were on a 7-hour game drive just to find that we had to drive another 7 hours immediately to get ourselves home. This is very contradictory to safely arriving home. This lockdown situation is extremely sensitive and inevitably comes with anxiety – the SANParks team took no measures to protect our ‘well-being’ in this regard. Further to the above the policy reviewing or media release does not say anything about our refunds for the day we had already paid for seeing that we were evacuated outside the boundaries of the President’s speech and regulations – lockdown was only effective 26 March 2020. It only considers future reservations and in essence disregards local tourists that already paid. With the substantial implications that this epidemic is going to have on our local tourism we want the management team to ensure that domestic tourism will survive through new and recurring bookings. We will however sadly not return. I trust SANParks will take our grievances into account to better future procedures and operate within the frontiers of the law. Best regards, Chris