South Africa Tourism
South Africa is a tourist paradise, offering scenic beauty, diverse wildlife, a kaleidoscope of cultures and traditions, and endless opportunities to explore the outdoors through sport and adventure activities.
Tourism has the potential to contribute to achieving the goals of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), which are to increase economic growth to 6% by 2010, and to assist in halving poverty and unemployment by 2014. The strategy has identified tourism as one of the key economic sectors with excellent potential for growth. As part of the growth platform targeted by AsgiSA, tourism has been set steep goals for the next five years: 500 000 new jobs, 8,5 million international arrivals annually and a contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) of at least R100 billion a year.
In June 2006, the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Mr Marthinus van Schalkwyk, announced the creation of the R20-million Tourism Equity Fund. This will provide access to much-needed support for small and medium-sized tour operators and small, medium and micro tourism enterprises (SMMEs).
To further strengthen growth in tourism, government is focusing on seven key priorities: transport, safety and security, product and business development, market growth, information, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and skills development. To address the skills gap, government has allocated R7,5 million to a partnership between the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, the Tourism Hospitality and Education Training Authority (Theta), the National Business Initiative and the Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA) to build a consensus skills plan to revise existing curricula and to streamline accreditation and certification.
Tourism is South Africa’s fastest-growing industry and contributes about 7,1% of GDP. In 2005, international tourism to South Africa surged to new record levels, with 10,3% more foreigners visiting the country in 2005 than in 2004, according to Statistics South Africa. Some 7,4 million people from other countries visited South Africa in 2005, compared with 6,7 million in 2004, which was a new record at the time.
In 1994, the year of South Africa's first democratic elections, only three million foreign visitors arrived in the country.
With just over 2,7 million arrivals from January to April 2006, the 2,5-million target was broken for the first time.
This represented a 16% increase in arrivals across all territories compared with the same period in 2005, translating into almost 377 000 more visitors.
The largest component of this growth came from Africa and the Middle East, whose visitors to South Africa rose by 21,9%. The Asia and Australasia region showed the second-largest growth at 7,1%, while the United Kingdom (UK), Germany and the United States of America (USA) remained South Africa’s most important long-haul markets.
In 2006, there was continued growth in visitors from the USA, and a 3,6% increase in visitors from Europe as a whole. There was a dramatic increase of 32% in the number of tourists from Brazil in the first quarter of 2006.
Tourism continues to make a significant contribution to job creation, with employment in the tourism sector increasing to 539 017 in 2005.
The fastest-growing segment of tourism in South Africa is ecological tourism (ecotourism), which includes nature photography, birdwatching, botanical studies, snorkelling, hiking and mountaineering. Community tourism is becoming increasingly popular, with tourists wanting to experience South Africa’s rural villages and townships.
