It seems that Ashanti Lodge, whose exorbitant 309% World Cup price increase we noted in January and who still hadn’t sold their rooms for the tournament just a couple of weeks ago, have had to rethink their pricing strategy for June and July.
Their rates page now has a little note for the dates over the duration of the World Cup:
Price on application as match days have different rates to non-match days.
The cynic in me wants to suggest that this is just another ploy to rip off fans traveling over to SA for the football.
And he’s probably right.
What Ashanti don’t seem to have realised is that fans attending the games at the Cape Town Stadium will still have the opportunity to fly out after the matches, as the airports will be running for pretty much 24 hours a day during the World Cup. And with greater numbers of cheaper flights being announced all the time, it will surely be more tempting to head “back home” to wherever you’re based, that to pay rip-off prices in Cape Town.
All of which augers well for businesses in the Mother City.
Not.
Give it time and Ashanti will be quite sad with themselves – I imagine they’ll get some cash out of this but in the end they’ll be sorry for it.
And as you say, as flights get cheaper (and they should) – it may well end up being cheaper to fly home than to stay at the (still) horribly overpriced Ashanti.
Check you out, you one-man-Anne-Robinsonesque-Watchdog-person you! Okay, so not quite the result you would like to have seen, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that Ashanti have a quiet time over the World Cup – I think they need a nice relaxing time, to recover from the renovations. 😀
.-= Helga Hansen´s last blog ..Gambolling on lamb =-.
There are also 29,000 other rooms in Cape Town to choose from.
I know this is dredging up the past but apparently Ashanti is still going as I saw their courtesy van go through a red robot on Tuesday morning and nearly drive into some poor guy on his way to work. I can’t say I was surprised to see it empty.
I love Ashanti’s music, i saw her perform once and it was the most memorable moment in the world, she is very attractive and real.