Johannesburg- The decision to move the country to adjusted alert level one has paid great dividends to the hospitality industry, with intra travel and more international visitors visiting our shores, the latest tourism data shows.
President Cyril Ramaphosa in October moved the country to level one in the face of declining new Covid-19 cases.
Data from Statistics South Africa show that in November, over 1-million people passed through South Africa’s ports of entry/exit.
A more detailed breakdown of the data shows that Germany, the United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands and France made up the top five of visitors to the country.
When it comes to the continent, visitors from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Eswatini and Botswana dominated the top five positions.
“Within the overseas regions, Australasia had the highest proportion of its tourists who came for holiday, 98,4% followed by North America, 98,4%; Central and South America, 97,7%; Europe, 97,1% The Middle East, 96,2% and Asia, 93,3%,” the Statistics South Africa report reads.
South Africa has been hit by even more travel restrictions in 2022 — around 91 countries currently ban travel to the country.
In South Africa, the direct contribution of the tourism sector to gross domestic product (GDP) was R130bn in 2018 and constituted nearly 3% direct contribution to GDP. In 2018, the tourism sector contributed about 4,5% of total employment in South Africa.
Ralph Hollister, a travel and tourism analyst at Global-Data, said: “International tourism provided a solid contribution to South Africa’s GDP, prior to the pandemic. We predict that international arrivals won’t reach pre-pandemic levels until 2024 in South Africa, further slowing economic recovery.”
In his 2019 State of the Nation address, Ramaphosa set a target of 21-million tourist arrivals by 2030 for the tourism sector.
Rosemary Anderson, Federated Hospitality Association of South Africa’s national chairperson, said the country had big potential to create jobs and grow the economy.
“Fedhasa has maintained that our tourism and hospitality sector have tremendous growth potential to make a significant dent in our totally unacceptable unemployment levels in South Africa, particularly the youth.
“All we require is for Home Affairs to waiver visas for a number of key markets and to introduce a true eVisa system — not an online system, which is currently being developed.
“This would enable us to attract millions of more international tourists to our magnificent shores, and in turn, would create many hundreds of thousands of new jobs in our sector.”
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