The Knysna Tourism office in the Garden Route town has closed temporarily due to a lack of funding from the local municipality.
Knysna Tourism NPC Chairperson, Elmay Bouwer, says their service level agreement with the local authority ended in June.
She says nine staff members have been retrenched since then but they’ve kept the office going until now.
Bouwer says they could not continue without paying their staff members.
“We will make the decision on moving forward at our AGM but it’s the operational side we ceased. The reason we closed the offices yesterday was we have had no guarantees of the funding coming forth for the two months we have assisted the municipality with their tourism mandate”.
However, Knysna Mayor, Mark Willemse, says the municipality will ensure that the tourism office stays open until Wesgro takes it over later this year.
“The front office will be operational as well as some of the other operations, like controlling the website, etc. Knysna Municipality will look at contracting some of the workers that have been involved with Knysna Tourism as well as our internal staff who have tourism experience. In the interim the SLA with Wesgro will be established and should kick in from first November”.
