PLETTENBERG BAY NEWS - The founder and chairperson of Plettenberg Bay Tourism, Paul Duverge, has been appointed to a top tourism post in SANParks; the newly created post of general manager of hospitality services and standards.
Duverge is a former managing director of Raw Africa Boutique Collection (Sky Villa and The Bungalow) and has also contributed to the tourism portfolio in the city of Tshwane.
He will focus on implementing and standardising hospitality touchpoints across all parks, ensuring service delivery aligns with world-class expectations.
The specifics covered will include:
- Standard operating procedures development and roll-out across accommodation and guest services
- In-room and site presentation standards
- Service excellence coaching
- Guest feedback systems
- Grading readiness
- Community-linked experiences (such as local wines and crafts)
- Hospitality-focused training and placements.
According to the most recent statistics, SANParks welcomes over six million visitors to all the national parks annually, including a significant number to the Garden Route National Park cluster.
Collaboration
Duverge will, along with other senior managers and general managers in tourism and marketing, visit SANParks clusters in the Western and Eastern Cape, as well as the Kruger cluster of Skukuza, Satara, Letaba and Lower Sabie.
This forms part of a "bottom-up collaborative national plan".
The visits will focus on identifying high-impact opportunities to raise standards and align guest experience with SANParks' conservation-led identity.
"The intention is to visit all SANParks clusters nationally, which means that I will be returning to the Garden Route at some point," he said.
Real transformation in collaboration
Duverge said he has learned a lot in Plett. "Especially about resistance to change and how new people or ideas were often unwelcome."
Transparency and innovation were treated with suspicion. Those experiences, some publicly documented, only deepened my understanding of what real transformation requires," he reflected.
"My past experience taught me how lonely transformation can be when the room isn't ready. Now, collaboration is the model - and the difference is night and day. Now I'm part of a team that values progress, alignment and accountability."
He said the mandate is to elevate, professionalise, and deliver experiences that make South Africans proud and keep international guests coming back.
"You can't elevate a guest experience without uplifting the people delivering it," he stressed. "We're investing in our teams - through training, recognition, and real accountability - because pride and purpose are the heartbeat of any world-class hospitality offering. Progress doesn't happen in silos. It's been refreshing to join a team that sees change not as a threat, but as a responsibility."
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