If you’re planning on travelling to South Africa for the World Cup, I hope you have already booked your hotel stay. Otherwise, you might find that only luxury hotels have any openings. And that might not be entirely bad.
During the Apartheid, it was common to say that hotels, hostels and pensions, among other facilities, reserved for the “non-white” majority were better than you could find in Europe, on average. But that just meant that the luxury hotels that were reserved for the white minority were so exquisite that there was no possible comparison between the two.
There was a concern among travel agencies that specialize on trips to the African continent, and South Africa in particular, that after the Apartheid was (finally) abolished, the overall quality of hotels and tourist facilities in South Africa would go down. This was, however, far from the truth.
South Africa has kept its place as one of the World’s leading tourist destinations, due primarily to its diversity and its ability to adapt to different circumstances. And the World Cup currently taking place there is a fine example of that. People from all over the world and all walks of life are uniting in the country around soccer.