Page 31 - TKZN Annual Report 2023/2024

South African Tourism Environment
According to modelling done by the National Treasury, the implementation of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan (15 October 2020) will raise economic growth to an average of 3% per annum over the next ten years. As an apex priority, tourism is expected to make an increasingly significant contribution to the South African economy, creating jobs, reducing poverty, and contributing to a better living environment for all.
The challenge is to grow current tourism levels to reach the goal of 21 million tourist arrivals by 2030. Pre-COVID-19, Tourism Decision Metrics (or TDM, the forecasting tool developed by Oxford Economics and used by South African Tourism) estimated that South Africa would receive 16.5 million arrivals in 2030 without any specific interventions to grow market share. The revised estimate, taking the impact of COVID-19 into account, has been reduced to 14.8 million arrivals.
A new growth approach needs to be adopted if South African Tourism is to close the gap to the aspirational target of 21 million international tourism arrivals by 2030 and support the vision for the tourism sector to increase its contribution to GDP from the current 3.5% to more than 5%.
Figure 8: South African Tourism’s pre-COVID target compared to post-COVID target
Source: Market Prioritisation and Investment Framework as of September 2020
International Tourists Visiting South Africa
In 2023, South Africa received 8.5 million international visitors, an increase of 48.8% from 2022 and a 16.8% decline from 2019. Their spending was also up by 104% in comparison to 2021, and length of stay in the country was an average of 10.6 nights.
Africa continues to be the largest source continent with 68% of tourist arrivals in 2023. Furthermore, the SADC market is dominant for all African arrivals, with 96,7% coming from this region. In 2023, the overseas arrivals were dominated by the usual source markets such as USA, UK, Germany, France and Netherlands. In other words, Europe is the dominant regional source market along with North America. The average international tourists’ satisfaction rating is 4.6 out of 5. Visitors from the Americas score for their time in SA was 4.6 from 4.7 in 2021. Satisfaction levels of African visitors increased in 2022 compared to 202, by 1.7% for Africa Land and 0.4% for Africa Air arrivals. There were declines from all regions excluding Africa.
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