Published on : Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Lately, SA Tourism’s Strategic, Insights and Analytics (SIA) team published their report for the January to October period. The results highlight an overall growth of 1, 7% when compared to the same period in 2017.
This amounts to 8, 6 million overseas tourists that have visited South Africa during this reporting period.
African land and air arrivals have been the prime factors to the growth with air arrivals from the continent showing a healthy 6, 8% rise. Growth in arrivals from Angola (38%), DRC (19,9%) and Ghana (17,8%) has motivated this growth.
From the standpoint of African land arrivals, the 2,7% increase in growth can be attributed to increase in arrivals from visitors from Malawi (13,3%) and Zimbabwe (7,7%).
“It’s really encouraging to see visitors from the continent making South Africa a destination on their travel plans,” said SA Tourism CEO, Sisa Ntshona.
“The growth is in line with some of the recently implemented visa reforms as well as some regional airlines increasing their flights into South Africa. We look forward to working closer with them through our Tourism Execution team on the continent to drive more visitors to South Africa.”
On the international front, Ntshona admits that there is enough work to be done.
“We are still recovering from barriers that had affected us in 2017 and the early parts of 2018, but are working extremely hard in addressing these challenges,” explained Ntshona.