A glimmer of good news on South Africa’s domestic tourism front

Tourist numbers to South Africa were up more than half a million in July – three times more than July 2021. That’s still off a low base though, as the sector battles to recover from the pandemic and the country’s devastating inclusion on the red list.

Statistics South Africa released its latest Tourism and Migration statistics for July 2022 on 27 September showing that 2,075,688 travellers had passed through the country’s ports of entry and exit. Of these, 715,714 were South African residents and 1,359,974 foreign travellers.

The domestic tourism sector had counted on a recovery towards the end of 2021, after SA was removed from the travel red list in October last year and that had an immediate effect on occupancy rates as they rose by 50%.

Within 48 hours of Omicron’s discovery in late November, South Africa’s tourism and hospitality sectors lost about R1-billion in cancelled bookings. And by the middle of December, SA once again faced heightened travel restrictions from about 90 countries.

Cape Town, as the country’s tourism hub, was the hardest hit by international cancellations, explained Kirsty de Groot of HTI Consulting.

“Prior to the pandemic, the tourism industry employed close to 50,000 people directly, and generated around R15-billion per annum. The average international tourist spends nine times more during their time in Cape Town than local visitors spend.”

The silver lining, though, was domestic travel.

Cape Town Tourism, conducting a dipstick survey to analyse the market response, found that 57% of its members – which include restaurants, hotels, shopping malls and tour operations – had performed better in December 2021 than the previous year and 64% had reported a rise in domestic visitors.

Occupancy in the greater Cape Town region was at 32.2% for the year ending December 2021, which had increased from a disappointing 28.3% in 2020.

The Central City Improvement District (CCID) said that 2021 had seen a number of hotels reopening after 2020 and the launching of new properties, including the Hotel Sky, Old Bank Hotel, The Capital 15 on Orange and the Rockefeller.

Domestic tourism, it said, was instrumental in saving the central city and its visitor economy. Tasso Evangelinos, CEO of the CCID, said in a statement that the latest statistics reinforced that the Cape Town inner city was not only the best place to work, live and play, but it had also proven to be resilient.

“This is the core of the city, where business, pleasure, travel and entertainment merge, and it is because of the locals that we survived many hurdles in 2021.”