Home
HT Regions
Contact Us
Tourism Enterprise Partnership
Order Crafts
Book Experiences
London England Fans
Photo Gallery

View Video
Eastern Cape Province
Free State Province
Gauteng Province
Kwa-Zulu Natal Province
Limpopo Province
Mpumalanga Province
North West Province
Northern Cape Province
Western Cape Province
Sophie Matsogi, Product Owner
 


JMT Tours and Safaris

 << Back
You can come to South Africa and experience “plastic” tourism. Or you can have a tourism experience that takes you under the surface to the real South Africa. Joe Motsogi does the second kind of tourism.

“We at JMT don’t do plastic tourism; we do real tourism,” says Joe about the business he and his wife Sophie started back in 1997.

Based in Soweto, Joe has personally ferried thousands of tourists from all over the world and South Africa around the sprawling township he calls home. He also takes them to Johannesburg, the world’s great city of gold. And he loves hitting the open road with visitors from around the world who are eager to get under the surface of South Africa and learn about its history and culture from this doyen of the travel industry.

Joe is as passionate about his business as he is about Soweto and Johannesburg. “You have to have passion to be in tourism,” says Joe, 56. “If you don’t have complete passion your clients will feel it. You might be with them for a week or only half a day but it’s their holidays. Or maybe it’s their business trip. In that case they’ve been working hard and want a meaningful break. Whatever brings them to South Africa they’ve come a long way and spent a lot of money and they want an experience they will never forget. They don’t want just another tour. If you don’t have passion, my advice is that you get out of the industry right away.”

Joe runs JMT with Sophie, whom he describes as “my pillar of strength”. The duo guarantee smiles and a willingness to go out of their way to adjust programmes as and when it suits clients. Whether the tour is around Soweto, downtown Johannesburg or to the Kruger National Park or Sun City, JMT Tours has the infrastructure and track record to provide a seamless service. More than this, it has the customer-centric ethos that is all about passion.
Much as he wishes he could clone himself and be with every tour party, Joe simply can’t meet each and every group of visitors. “But we do make sure that we only employ people who have the kind of passion I’m talking about,” explains Joe.

The business has three tour guides and one driver, all of them properly certified and licensed and all of them as dedicated to customer service as the owners. JMT has vehicles, all of them also properly certified, that can carry between seven and 45 people but, when the need arises, the company will hire in trusted freelance guides and coaches that can transport literally hundreds.

A typical Soweto half-day tour lasts three-and-a-half hours to four hours. It includes visits to such landmarks as the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication where the Freedom Charter was signed in 1955 and the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in the world, Nelson Mandela’s house and the Hector Pieterson Museum, site of the explosion that became the 1976 students’ uprising.

A half-day tour, says Joe, is enough to give the first-time visitor a feel for the history and vibe of the township (if, that is, it is undertaken with a top-notch agency such as JMT) but he strongly believes that Soweto will reward the tourist who invests more time in exploring its many layers.

“Soweto is very special because it is home to so many world icons,” reckons Joe. “Think of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, [football administrator] Ivan Khoza, Winnie Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, yes, Joe Motsogi. I’m one of the icons of Soweto.” At which point the genial entrepreneur roars with laughter, a sign that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. “After you leave Soweto, after being with Joe, you really feel that you have experienced the place.”
The Fifa football World Cup in 2010 is  going to be “a very big deal” for the country and Soweto in particular, Joe says, a full nine months before the world’s biggest sporting event was due to kick off in South Africa. “There is enormous road construction, the B&Bs are mushrooming ahead of the World Cup, tour operators already have bookings; everyone is getting excited about 2010.”

But Joe clearly believes that World Cup 2010 will be just the beginning. “It’s going to put Soweto on the map like it’s never been before. The long-term spin-offs from 2010 will be immense but we need to make sure that we have the passion the world is expecting from us.”
 
Hidden Treasures™ is created and managed by TEP | Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions