FAST-tracking the grading of accommodation facilities is one of SA's major challenges ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said yesterday.

According to Van Schalkwyk, only 8% of SA's backpackers and youth hostels were graded and 16% of game reserves and lodges had been graded.

SA, a member of the World Tourism Organisation, yesterday joined in the celebration of the World Tourism Day.

This year's global theme is sport and tourism.

In SA the celebrations were held in Limpopo.

Speaking at a tourism indaba earlier this year, Gauteng Tourism Authority CEO Terry Tselane lamented the prevalence of ungraded accommodation facilities in the country.

Van Schalkwyk said about 2409 facilities in SA had been graded voluntarily, representing 55% of all hotel rooms and 68% of all bed and breakfasts and guest houses.

"To accelerate grading participation across the industry, we are training and accrediting 100 new grading assessors in all nine provinces to join the 43 existing assessors," he said.

The training initiative would assist provinces such as Limpopo, which did not have any assessors. "From the side of government, we are investigating how best to encourage the ungraded facilities to become part of the system," he said.

The minister said most of SA's municipalities did not have reliable figures on key indicators such as the number of hospitality beds, tourism's contribution to municipal finances, transformation and the number of people employed in the sector.

Van Schalkwyk also announced that SA's tourism authorities were planning a second domestic tourism campaign Sho't Left for next year following the success of this year's campaign. He said the campaign had achieved its aim of showing that tourism was affordable.