The Klerksdorper

Some of South Africa’s top hotels are going all out to ensure that they get selected as “base camps” by soccer World Cup sides.

With 11 teams so far having qualified for the tournament , Fifa’s Delia Fischer says a hotel catalogue for teams has been drawn up by the organisation’s accommodation arm, Match.

“Certain teams have been here for the last couple of months to look at hotels,” she said.

Last week, the boss of the local World Cup organising committee, Danny Jordaan, said 55 base camps throughout the country had been identified.

“Sixteen teams have already identified where they would like to base themselves. Of course, it is subject to the teams qualifying,” he said.

Reuters reported last week that Germany, which has yet to qualify, had chosen the unfinished Velmore hotel, near Pretoria, as its 2010 base camp.

Fifa, Fisher said, will publish its camp list in early January.

Meanwhile, some hotels are sending marketers overseas to better their chances of scoring teams. Others are upgrading their facilities.

Val de Vie, a wine and polo estate in the Franschhoek Valley, is going to great lengths to lure a top squad, including converting its polo fields into practise soccer pitches and planting Fifa-specified turf on them.

The estate’s 2010 co-ordinator, Martin Botha, said they already have massage and medical treatment rooms and team-building facilities.

“We’re going to change the grass to the Fifa specifications for practice fields but otherwise everything else is in place,” he says.

This month, Botha is heading to Europe to join a delegation from his local Drakenstein municipality at a marketing expo in Serbia.

He says that any of the top 12 seeded teams would be perfect for Val de Vie.

“We have made contact with some of the federations but at this stage we are not willing to make any comment on who we’re focusing on because they are also very reluctant to say or to make any official comment,” he said.

“But we can say we’ve approached top countries according to the Fifa rankings.”

East London’s Blue Lagoon hotel hosted the Italian rugby team for the 1995 World Cup and would like to host a soccer team next year.

Its general manager, Peter Gregerson, said he was in discussions with the Buffalo City municipality and had “followed up on some leads”.

“We’ve got three or four countries that have contacted us and are interested. They found us through their contacts, or we spoke to them through personal communication,” he says.

Gregerson would not say which teams had expressed interest but said he would be able to confirm a booking towards the end of November.

Sandy Botha, head of marketing for Klerksdorp, in the North West, and its municipality, Matlosana, said the economic spin-offs of attracting a popular soccer team would be huge.

“We’re targeting a team with a strong fan base so that we can benefit from the economic spin- offs.

“We’d love Portugal or Ivory Coast or Holland,” she said.

“The team that comes must have lots of fans so the city can benefit. The fans will have to eat in restaurants. We’ve got lots of restaurants and a couple of shopping centres.”

Botha said that, since her city was chosen by Fifa as a “base camp city”, two new hotels had been built and “guesthouses are springing up everywhere”.

Source: The Times