Cape Town has yet again found its way into the spotlight, and this time it has a few awards to show for it. The Mother City has been named Africa’s Leading City Destination 2026 and Africa’s Leading Meetings & Conference Destination 2026, while the Port of Cape Town has taken the title of Africa’s Leading Cruise Port 2026 at the 2026 World Travel Awards Africa. 

Three awards are a pretty good way to remind everyone why Cape Town is one of South Africa’s biggest attractions. 

The timing could not be better either. September is both Heritage Month and Tourism Month, so what better way to welcome the month than with Cape Town collecting awards and reminding us that, actually, we have a pretty impressive country to show off. 

Cape Town Knows How to Host an Event 

If the city’s recent track record is anything to go by, it certainly knows how to put on an event.  

The Springboks played the All Blacks at DHL Stadium this past weekend, and just in case a packed stadium and one of the biggest rivalries in rugby were not enough, two Airlink aircraft decided to make an appearance overhead. One represented the Springboks and the other the All Blacks, flying over the stadium before kick-off. Naturally, the moment ended up all over social media. 

Cape Town really does not do quiet entrances. 

The flyover has since attracted attention from an aviation safety perspective, with the South African Civil Aviation Authority reviewing the flight data, so we will leave that discussion to the aviation experts. The online reaction did, however, highlight something that makes events so memorable: people love a bit of a spectacle. 

That got us thinking about what happens behind the scenes of the events people actually attend. 

There Is a Lot More Happening Behind the Scenes 

When you attend a big event or a conference, you probably are not thinking about how the registration system works, whether an exhibitor has paid for their stand or how the organisers are keeping track of hundreds of attendees. Someone has to think about all of that. 

Managing registrations, exhibitor bookings, payments, communications and reporting across separate systems can become a headache pretty quickly, especially when you are relying on different plugins and systems to keep everything connected. 

This is the exact problem we wanted to solve when we started developing Conference Up for the Hospital Association of South Africa’s annual conference. The platform has been developed and refined over the past three years, evolving along the needs of the conference. 

Introducing Conference Up 

Conference Up is a custom platform created in collaboration with INCOSO, two Cape Town-based teams working together to bring every part of the conference together within HASA’s existing WordPress website. 

Registrations, exhibitor stand bookings, invoicing, online payments, email communications and reporting all sit within the same system, with the platform tailored to the different people using it. Attendees, exhibitors and organisers each have different requirements, so the platform was built around those needs rather than trying to squeeze everyone into a generic solution. 

So, Why Not Just Use Plugins? 

There is nothing wrong with plugins. We use WordPress, after all. The issue is when you need a plugin for registrations, another for payments, another for forms, another for emails and another for reporting. 

Before long, you have a collection of different systems that all need to work together, while someone has to keep track of whether they actually are. 

That’s the problem we wanted to solve with Conference Up. Instead of piecing together ten different plugins and hoping they all play nicely, we built one system around HASA’s actual conference requirements. 

A Pretty Good Month for Cape Town 

Cape Town has certainly had quite a week. Two awards for the city, another for the Port of Cape Town, a big Springboks match and two planes flying over a stadium is certainly one way to get people talking. 

With Heritage Month and Tourism Month now underway, it is also a good reminder of just how much there is to celebrate here. 

Cape Town has the destinations, the events and the experiences that keep people coming back. We get to add something else to that list: technology built right here to help businesses and events run better. Want to see what we can build for your business?