Guest House Association of South Africa

08/10/2026

THE BRIEF | Thursday 8 October

Emirates is putting a second daily flight between Dubai and Durban into the festive season. The extra flight is EK2535 inbound and EK2536 outbound, on top of the daily EK775 and EK776 that already run.

The December block starts in 70 or 71 days, depending which report you read. More on that in a moment.

THE EXTRA FLIGHT

Dubai to Durban. EK2535, depart 04:00, arrive 10:30.
Durban to Dubai. EK2536, depart 12:15, arrive 22:30.

Both reports give those flight numbers and those times. AeroRoutes names the aircraft as a three class Boeing 777-300ER.

THE DATES WE CANNOT RECONCILE

AeroRoutes, published 3 October 2026, gives the December block as 18 to 23 December 2026.

Travel News, published 7 October 2026, gives it as 17 to 23 December 2026.

Both give the January block as 2 to 8 January 2027.

So the two are one day apart on when the December flights start. Neither carries a statement from Emirates, and Emirates' own Dubai to Durban page does not mention the extra flights at all. If a guest tells you they land on 17 December on the early flight, check the schedule on emirates.com for their date rather than trust our number or theirs.

SOMETHING ELSE THAT DOES NOT MATCH

Emirates' own website lists the existing daily service as EK775 leaving Dubai 10:15 and reaching Durban 16:35, with EK776 leaving Durban 18:40 and reaching Dubai 05:00 the next day. The schedule filed for the peak period shows EK775 reaching Durban at 17:10 and EK776 leaving Durban at 19:05. Seasonal schedules move. Check the actual date, not the website's standard times.

The daily Durban service itself only resumed on 10 June 2026. Before that it ran Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

No fare and no seat count have been published for the extra flights. Do not build a December quote around an assumed airfare.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO A GUEST HOUSE OWNER

Three things, and they are about the clock rather than the marketing.

A 10:30 landing at King Shaka puts a guest at your gate by about midday, in front of a 14:00 check in. On those dates you will get early arrival requests from people who have been in the air all night. Decide now what you will do about it, and whether you charge for it.

A 12:15 departure from Durban means a guest leaving on the extra flight walks out between 09:00 and 09:30. Breakfast earlier, room cleaned earlier, and that room is sellable again the same night.

And the plain one. These are international arrivals landing in the tightest two weeks of the KwaZulu-Natal year. If your diary still has gaps on 17 or 18 to 23 December, or on 2 to 8 January, those are the nights to look at first this week, on every site you load.

None of this helps you if your calendar for those dates is closed or your rates for them are not loaded.

SOURCES

https://www.aeroroutes.com/eng/261003-eknw26dur
https://www.travelnews.co.za/article/ek-adds-durban-flights-for-peak-season
https://www.emirates.com/za/english/destinations/dxb/dur/flights-from-dubai-to-durban/

Book flights across the world and Fly Better with Emirates. Explore our global routes, find the best fares, and discover our unforgettable onboard experience.

07/10/2026

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
Majini Guest House, Constantia

Majini means "on the water", and the name fits. Three self-catering cottages sit in over an acre of landscaped garden in the Constantia Valley, looking out over Tokai forest and Elephant's Eye, with wetlands running through the property and plenty of birdlife using them. Suzy has run it for over 20 years.

What you get:
- Three fully equipped self-catering cottages: Hadeda Cottage, The Gallery and The Pool House
- A pool set in the garden
- A private sauna and a gym for guests
- A fridge stocked with goodies when you arrive
- Catering for special events, by arrangement

The fridge is the detail guests remember. A lot of them come back every year, which says more than any write-up can.

It works for a holiday and for a work trip. Kirstenbosch, the Constantia w**e farms, beaches and golf courses are close by, and the city centre is about 25 minutes away. Do your meetings in town, then come back to a garden and the sunset.

Suzy on being a GHASA member: "It brings my guests and myself peace of mind and comfort, knowing that advice, experience and help is available should it be necessary."

Book direct: https://www.majiniguesthouse.co.za
Instagram:

Majini Guest House is a GHASA member.

07/10/2026

THE BRIEF | Wednesday 7 October

Airlink announced yesterday that it will fly Cape Town to Lanseria from Friday 4 December 2026. Twice a day, seven days a week, on a 98 seat Embraer E190. It is the first scheduled domestic service Airlink has operated from Lanseria.

That is 58 days from today, and it lands in the middle of your festive season.

THE SCHEDULE, FROM 4 DECEMBER

Lanseria to Cape Town. Depart 09:10, arrive 11:35. Depart 13:00, arrive 15:25.
Cape Town to Lanseria. Depart 09:20, arrive 11:35. Depart 13:30, arrive 15:45.

From Monday 22 March 2027 it goes to four return flights a day.

Airlink chief executive de Villiers Engelbrecht, quoted by Tourism Update: "Travel options on this route have been limited, and our intention is to give passengers a comfortable and enjoyable alternative for travelling between the two regions, while also complementing our existing services to OR Tambo."

Separately, Airlink starts three flights a week from Lanseria to Harare on Sunday 15 November 2026.

WHAT WE COULD NOT CONFIRM

No fare, and no date for when seats go on sale. Tourism Update, Travel News and ATTA all carried the schedule and the aircraft yesterday. None of the three published a price or a booking open date. So do not build a December quote around an assumed airfare. Check flyairlink.com or your usual agent before you put a number in writing.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO A GUEST HOUSE OWNER

Four things.

If you are in Cape Town, your guests have a second Johannesburg airport from 4 December. Both Lanseria departures are early in the day, 09:20 and 13:30. A guest on the 09:20 needs breakfast and a car out of your gate well before 08:00. Worth knowing before you promise a 08:00 breakfast to a December booking.

If you are inside an hour of Lanseria, this is new arrivals. Hartbeespoort, Broederstroom, Muldersdrift, Magaliesburg, Krugersdorp, Fourways, the Cradle. Cape Town guests who would have landed at OR Tambo and driven across the city now land on your side of it. Two flights a day, 98 seats each, every day.

Your directions page is probably wrong from 4 December. Most Gauteng guest houses have a getting here page written entirely around OR Tambo. There is a second answer now, and the drive is shorter. Same for your Booking.com and Airbnb location fields, where there is a place to name the nearest airport.

Your transfer rate needs doing anyway. The fuel increase landed this morning. Petrol 95 is up R3,33 a litre and 0,005 percent diesel is up R3,24. If you quote airport runs as a fixed figure, you are repricing those this week regardless. Do the Lanseria distance at the same time rather than twice.

ONE THING WE ARE NOT SAYING

Nobody has published passenger numbers for this route, because it has not flown yet. Two flights a day is not a wave. Treat it as a reason to check your directions, your transfer prices and your arrival times, not a reason to change your rates.

SOURCES
https://www.tourismupdate.com/article/airlink-announces-first-domestic-route-from-lanseria
https://www.travelnews.co.za/article/airlink-announces-first-domestic-route-from-lanseria
https://atta.travel/resource/airlink-adds-cape-town-lanseria-route-from-december.html

Airlink connects you to the widest network and choice of flights in Southern Africa and St Helena Island.

07/10/2026

06/10/2026

Statistics South Africa published the July accommodation figures yesterday. Guest houses and guest farms took 28,2 percent more income from accommodation than in July last year.

Read the rest of that table before you feel bad about your own July.

The sector did not add beds. Stay units available were flat at 0,0 percent. Nights sold rose 7,2 percent. The average price per night rose 19,6 percent. So most of the extra money came from charging more, not from filling more rooms.

And the occupancy rate for guest houses and guest farms in July was 24,6 percent.

That is about one night in four sold. July is our quiet month, so nobody should be shocked by a low number. But it does mean the sector earned well while three quarters of the beds stood empty. Some places are catching those nights. Plenty are not.

Here is one reason that has nothing to do with your rooms.

Most owners have never read their own listing.

Not the photos. The words. The paragraph a guest reads on their phone before deciding whether to click.

On Booking.com you did not write that paragraph. Booking.com did.

Their partner pages say it plainly. "We use your room details, facilities, location details and more to auto-generate your property description containing the most relevant information for potential guests."

And again, in their help centre. "Your property description is autogenerated from key details you provide, like facilities, room information, and location."

So every tick box you filled in one evening three years ago is being turned into sentences and shown to guests today. If the boxes are thin, the paragraph is thin. If a box is wrong, the paragraph is wrong.

Booking.com also says people do not read all of it. Their words: "our data shows guests don't read the whole description." So the first line carries the weight.

And it travels. Booking.com says the description is "Instantly available in 25 languages". One wrong tick box is wrong in 25 languages.

If there is a real error in yours, they have a button for it. In the Extranet, go to Property, then View your descriptions, then "Spotted a typo? Request a fix".

Airbnb works the other way round. There you write the description yourself, and most owners give it five minutes.

Airbnb says it does real work. "A comprehensive listing description helps guests evaluate the listing and develop the confidence to book."

Their own advice is short and sensible. "Keep it brief. Guests often scan listing descriptions for key features. Lead with what's most important, and avoid duplicating information that appears in other parts of your listing, like your full list of amenities."

And this one, which saves arguments later. "Be realistic. Overselling or exaggerating can lead to disappointment and negative reviews."

One more, and it takes five minutes. Airbnb says of your listing title: "Start with the most important information, and try to use fewer than 50 characters. Longer titles are automatically shortened in search results to fit smaller screens."

Go and count the characters in your title. If it runs long, the end of it vanishes on a phone. Whatever you put last is the part nobody sees.

None of this costs money. Your facilities list on Booking.com is one evening at the kitchen table. Your Airbnb description is half a page in your own voice, and you have said all of it on the telephone a hundred times already.

We built a free check so you can see where you actually stand. Fifteen questions, all multiple choice, under a minute. Nothing to look up and no report to wait for.

https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/bjBnLN?Lead_Source=Facebook

The booking sites are not the enemy here. They send you real guests and they charge real commission for it. This is about earning more from the money you are already paying them.

Open to any guest house or B and B in South Africa, member or not.

The GHASA team

06/10/2026

South Africa took 5 584 473 international tourists in the first six months of this year. That is 12.3 percent more than the same six months last year, on the Stats SA figures.

More people came. If your year did not feel 12 percent better, this post is about one of the reasons, and it is one nobody ever explains to a guest house owner.

It is your calendar.

Not the diary at reception. The calendar on Booking.com, on Airbnb, on LekkeSlaap. The one a stranger is looking at when they are choosing between you and four other places.

Here is what the sites say about it, in their own words.

Booking.com tells its partners: "You can increase your visibility in search results and attract early bookers by loading rates and availability well in advance." It also says: "The more rooms or units you make available, the more travelers you can potentially appeal to." And it tells you to load a price for every date you have opened, because a date sitting there with no rate on it cannot be booked.

Airbnb says: "The more dates a listing is available, the more likely it is compatible with a guest's plans." It also says that changing your trip length "can open your calendar and help your listing appear in more search results", and that letting people book further ahead does the same.

Now think about how a real guest house actually runs.

You load three months and top it up when you remember. Perfectly sensible. It also means the family sitting down in January to plan next December never sees you.

You close June and July because it is quiet anyway. Sensible. It also means that for two months you are not on the shelf at all, so the one person who was looking never finds you.

You put a two night minimum on every weekend, because a one night booking is not worth the laundry and the breakfast. Sensible. It also quietly takes you out of every search made by somebody who wants one night.

You open a few dates and never get round to putting a rate on them. They sit there looking available and nobody can book them.

None of that is bad management. That is what it looks like when one person is running a building, a kitchen, a staff roster and a booking system. The calendar gets done last, at eleven at night, if it gets done.

The house down the road with a lock box on the gate has one job, and the calendar is part of it. Nobody there is cooking breakfast.

So it starts to feel like this. Fewer enquiries than last year. More empty nights out of season. More people asking for a discount. The same hours for less money at the end of the month.

It feels personal. It is not. Nobody sent a letter to say the calendar had become part of the marking.

And this is the cheap part of it. It costs nothing. An hour at the kitchen table.

Load twelve months, not three.
Open the quiet season and price it instead of closing it.
Drop the minimum stay midweek and out of season.
Put a rate on every date you have opened.
Make sure a date you have blocked on one site is blocked on all of them.

We built a free check so you can see where you actually stand. Fifteen questions, all multiple choice, under a minute. Nothing to look up and no report to wait for.

https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/bjBnLN?Lead_Source=Facebook

The booking sites are not the enemy here. They send you real guests and they charge real commission for it. This is about earning more from the money you are already paying them.

Open to any guest house or B and B in South Africa, member or not.

The GHASA team

06/10/2026

THE BRIEF | Tuesday 6 October

The official fuel price is out. From 00:01 tomorrow, Wednesday 7 October, petrol 95 goes up R3,33 a litre. That is more than both projections we ran on 1 October, which were R3,12 and R3,16. Inland 95 goes over R30 a litre for the first time.

Tonight is the last night at the old price.

WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE 1 OCTOBER

We ran projections that day and said plainly not to print a rate card off them. The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources announced the official figures on Monday 5 October. The final increase on 95 is 17 cents a litre bigger than the higher of the two projections, and 21 cents bigger than the lower one.

THE INCREASES, FROM 7 OCTOBER

Petrol 95, up R3,33 a litre.
Petrol 93, up R3,12.
Diesel 0,05 percent, up R2,84, wholesale.
Diesel 0,005 percent, up R3,24, wholesale.
Illuminating paraffin, up R3,58, wholesale.
LPG in Gauteng, up 42 cents a kilogram.

NEW INLAND PRICES

Petrol 95, R30,25. Petrol 93, R29,88.
Diesel 0,05 percent, R31,95. Diesel 0,005 percent, R33,29.

NEW COASTAL PRICES

Petrol 95, R29,38. Petrol 93, R29,09.
Diesel 0,05 percent, R31,08. Diesel 0,005 percent, R32,03.

ONE FIGURE WE CANNOT RECONCILE

BusinessTech, Stuff, Getaway and SAPeople all give the new inland 0,005 percent diesel price as R33,29. TimesLIVE gives R32,80.

The arithmetic supports R33,29. The price in effect since 2 September was R30,05 and the announced increase is R3,24. If you are budgeting generator diesel to the exact rand, read the board at your own supplier rather than trust our number.

THE SLATE LEVY

The Department, in its statement: "In line with the provisions of the Self-Adjusting Slate Levy Mechanism, a Slate Levy of 87.66 c/l will be implemented into the price structures of Petrol and Diesel with effect from 07 October 2026."

That is inside the pump price, not a separate bill.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO A GUEST HOUSE OWNER

Three things.

Tonight. Anything you fill before midnight is bought at the old price. The bakkie, the shuttle, the jerry cans, the lawnmower. The grade moving hardest is 0,005 percent diesel, R3,24 a litre, and that is the generator grade.

Your festive quotes. December is being priced right now, in October. On petrol 95 a 60 litre fill costs R199,80 more from tomorrow. If you quote transfers, airport runs or game drives as one inclusive figure, either reprice today or write into the quote that fuel is charged at cost on the day of travel.

Your rate card and your website. Every page where you have typed a transfer price, an airport run or a per kilometre rate is wrong from tomorrow. Fix it before the first December enquiry, not after you have already honoured it.

SOURCES
https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/878120/here-is-the-official-petrol-price-for-october-8/
https://stuff.co.za/2026/10/05/octobers-official-fuel-prices-here-petrol-r30-l/
https://www.getaway.co.za/news/south-africa-fuel-prices-october-2026/

The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources has published the official fuel price adjustments that will take effect on Wednesday, 7 October 2026.

05/10/2026

05/10/2026

THE BRIEF | Monday 5 October

SARS closes its employer interim reconciliation on Saturday 31 October. That is 26 days from today. If you pay even one person and you are registered with SARS as an employer, this one is yours, and it is not the deadline we wrote about on Friday.

THE DATES

SARS, on its own Pay As You Earn page: "The Employer Interim Reconciliation submission period is from 21 September to 31 October 2026."

It covers the six months from 1 March 2026 to 31 August 2026. That is the first half of the current tax year.

Get this part straight. The 23 October date we ran on Friday is your personal income tax return, for the tax year that ended 28 February 2026. This one is your payroll, for the half year that ended 31 August 2026. Two different returns, two different deadlines, eight days apart.

WHAT YOU SUBMIT

An EMP501 declaration, plus the employee tax certificate information, being the interim IRP5 and IT3(a) certificates for every person you paid in those six months.

CRS Technologies, in a note dated 1 September 2026, lists what has to reconcile: "PAYE, UIF and SDL declarations and payments, as well as employee information and interim IRP5/IT3(a) certificates."

In plain terms, three numbers must agree. What you declared on your monthly EMP201s. What you actually paid SARS. What the certificates say.

THE SOFTWARE PART, WHICH CATCHES PEOPLE

If you file on e@syFile Employer, the current version is 8.0.2, released 21 September 2026. SARS is blunt about old copies. "The latest version of e@syFile must always be used as any information submitted to SARS using a previous version won't be accepted."

So the copy sitting on the office computer since last year does not fail politely. It fails.

On channels, SARS's guidance for the previous interim period said employers with 50 or fewer employees could use either eFiling or e@syFile Employer, and employers with 50 or more had to use e@syFile. We could not find that sentence restated for the 2026 interim period on the same page. If you plan to file on eFiling, confirm it this week rather than in the last days of the month.

WHAT LATE COSTS

SARS: "Late submission of an EMP501 will result in administrative penalties equal to 1% of your annual PAYE liability. This penalty increases by 1% for every month the return remains outstanding, up to a maximum of 10%."

Per month, to a ceiling of 10 percent of a year's PAYE.

CRS Technologies and Accounting Weekly both also report that unclaimed Employment Tax Incentive amounts can be forfeited where an employer is not compliant. If you claim ETI on younger staff, that is cash, not paperwork.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO A GUEST HOUSE OWNER

Three things.

You have a payroll whether you call it one or not. A housekeeper, a breakfast cook, a gardener, somebody on the gate at night. If SARS has you registered as an employer, the half year return is due regardless of how small the payroll is.

Tax compliance has become a gate on money. Grading support, provincial tourism funding and tender work all ask for your status. A penalty accruing at 1% a month is the sort of thing that quietly breaks that status in the month you need it clean.

October is your last quiet month. The last week of October is also when every payroll office in the country is filing. Do it in the next fortnight, not in the queue.

WHO TO PHONE

SARS Contact Centre, 0800 00 7277. SARS publishes the hours as weekdays 8:00 to 16:00, except Wednesdays 9:00 to 16:00, closed weekends and public holidays.

If a bookkeeper runs your payroll, phone them this week and ask two questions. Has the interim EMP501 gone in, and on which version of e@syFile.

We are not your tax practitioner and this is not tax advice.

https://www.sars.gov.za/types-of-tax/pay-as-you-earn/
https://www.sars.gov.za/businesses-and-employers/my-business-and-tax/easyfile/

Submitting accurate declarations on time lets employers avoid penalties, interest, and unnecessary administrative work. After submitting an EMP501