Johannesburg, the global tourism industry has shown remarkable resilience and recovery in 2024 and leading into the current year, with significant contributions to economic growth, job creation, and GDP. However, regional conflicts, including the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Middle East, changing American government posture towards South Africa and many African countries, extreme weather events, disrupted travel patterns and seasonal mobility have resulted in re routed flights, changed travel bookings, and altered travel sentiments generally.
Sector Recovery
Despite all these challenges and outlook, for Gauteng, our golden city region has always been more than just a province. It is the heartbeat of our nation, the engine room of South Africa’s economy, the work, stay and playground for emerging entrepreneurs, massive students’ population and millennials and a living symbol of resilience, diversity, and ambition.
Gauteng serves as a major entry point for African and international travelers with the OR Tambo International Airport connecting with over 25 African cities. The province plays champion host to many Pan-African corporate headquarters, diplomatic missions, and continental conferences, exhibitions and meetings encouraging short to medium term bleisure travel from across Africa resulting in high frequency repeat visitation and extended staycations.
A critical enabler of South Africa and Gauteng’s tourism revival has been the improvement in air connectivity. The return of direct international flights to OR Tambo Airport enhanced regional air links, and partnerships with airlines have made travel to and within the province more accessible.
South Africa Tourism Performance
The tourism’s economic footprint extends well beyond airlines and hotels. It drives demand across a wide range of sectors, including agriculture, food services, retail, banking, and small businesses. In fact, more than two-thirds of the sector’s economic impact is generated through supply chain activity, capital investment and government spending showing just how deeply tourism is embedded in the economy.
South Africa’s tourism sector contributed approximately USD 34.6 billion (ZAR 618.7 billion) to the national economy in 2024, still 9.4% below 2019 levels but indicative of a steady post pandemic recovery. In 2024, most South Africa’s international tourists originated from within the Southern African Development Community (SADC), accounting for 74% of total arrivals. An additional 1.9% came from non-SADC African markets, bringing the continent’s total contribution to 75.9% of all visitors.
Overseas markets, including Europe, North America, and Asia, represented 24.0% of arrivals, underscoring their continued importance as a secondary but high-value and revenue source of tourism demand for our province and economy.
Domestic tourism equally played a central role in sustaining the sector’s momentum. South Africa led in this category, with domestic travelers spending approximately USD 24 billion (ZAR 430 billion), underlining the strength and resilience of the local travel market.
Destination GAUTENG Tourism Performance
Reading against the above national figures, Gauteng has without a doubt reinforced its status as the most visited province in South Africa and the continent’s most globally connected tourism gateway. In 2024/25, Gauteng recorded over 3.8 million international arrivals, a significant increase from the previous year’s 2.6 million.
As a result of this massive increase in international arrivals into our province, the foreign direct spend or international tourism revenue contribution also rose to a whopping R41 Billion smashing our target of R29 billion decisively. This growth was not accidental, it is the product of targeted strategic investment in increased airlift capacity, new air routes development, and heighted and impact driven destination marketing initiatives and strategic bidding and hosting of catalytic signature events, conferences, and exhibitions.
While Gauteng remains the net exporter of domestic travel due to the high number of people with a sizable disposal income per capita, we have still managed to achieve 6.4million domestic trips and generated a total of R21 billion in domestic spending, underscoring our residents’ pride and participation in the provincial tourism economy and offerings.
More than R1.8 billion was realized as direct contribution of hosted quality signature events in the province and a total of R19 million in revenue was generated for SMMEs underscoring the transformative nature of tourism and quality events hosting and leveraging in the province.
To just demonstrate how massive the visitor economy is in Gauteng compared to other provinces and against popular believe, Gauteng’s over 3.8 million international arrivals is almost half of the overall South African international tourists’ arrival. The R41 billion in foreign tourism revenue generated comes from an overall South African tourism foreign revenue figure of R107 billion once again reaffirming the pole position of Gauteng in major tourism performance metrics.
What is pleasing us more is the fact that, Africa continues to lead the way in terms of the actual international arrivals into our country. As Gauteng, our tourism, trade, and investment facilitation strategy is premised on Africa first and followed by our other source markets like United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Middle East, and Brazil.
We welcome the deployment of the crime prevention wardens, the tourism monitors and the Joburg’s tourism ambassadors to some of our mainstay signature and community events and tourists’ attractions as part of an integrated destination Gauteng safety plan.
With this collaboration and participation by other civil society bodies like Jozi My Jozi and the cleaning cohorts from our provincial Environment department, we can institutionalize this work and make it a year-long programme that not only supporting the province’s events calendar but attends to residents’ and visitor’s safety, destination cleanliness and further assists us to deal with seasonality issues and the geographic spread of our events and related visitor economy activities.
Driving our responsible practices in Gauteng is a dedicated direct public communication and call to action messaging encouraging residents and visitors to consume our gambling, liquor, and shopping offerings responsibly.
Tourism is the major driver of increased usage and footfall in our gambling and amusement parks facilities. It drives alcohol consumption and broader consumer sales efforts especially during the high seasons and the need for an integrated and single message pronouncing that winners knows when to stop and no alcohol sales to children under 18, do not drink and drive amongst others is very important.
Moving Forward – Innovation Driven, Collaborations Focused and High- Impact Tourism Marketing & Development Work in Gauteng
As we seek to modernize and transform the way in which we provide our services, listen more and less talk and more action, the tourism sector in our province together with its sub industries need to adjust, be agile, responsive, now, and future growth focused.
In that regard, we will be exploring aggressive partner marketing and co-creation initiatives in the areas of music, sports, and wellness tourism. We need to participate in the development of digital technologies that ensure our destination is Always On and Always Connected. We must play in the gaming development solutions, support sports academies and coaching development initiatives that seeks to bring visitors for longer stay in our destination.
We need to explore cost-effective, data and insights driven collaborations with these acts that are international in their own rights on selling and positioning our province effectively in these markets
using the power of the creative sector and its soft currency.
Gauteng needs to leverage better its sports and cultural icons and legends. These are a pool of well trained and travelled individuals who are ready to help their country, tell and share its story through their own accounts, trials, and tribulations. Moving forward, we need to build a well defined and socialized Gauteng Tourism Sports and Wellness Route and a structured and inclusive Gauteng Music Tourism Route as new catalytic visitor economy products and experiences in association with partners like our legendary football, rugby and cricket teams, stadium management and federations.
We will be mainstreaming tourism infrastructure development into our work of building an SEZ’s led economic growth in Gauteng. Importantly, we are reimagining and re designing the Ga Rankuwa Hotel School and working with the private sector, various SETAs and all entities of the provincial government, the township of Ga-Rankuwa and our province will soon have a world class tourism and hospitality facility they can be proud of.
Our province is ready to host the G20 World Leaders Summit, we have proved ourselves many times and take courage from the tremendous support, encouragement and best wishes received from the many country’s delegations we have been engaging with, hosting, and learning from.
I’m pleased to confirm that as the Provincial Government of Gauteng and the department of Economic Development and the GTA in particular, we have accepted the National Minister of Tourism’s request for us to host the National World Tourism Day on 27th September 2025 at our world heritage site of Constitution Hill.
In March next year as announced recently by the Minister of Sports, Arts, Culture & Recreation and Gauteng Premier, the golden province of Gauteng and the majestic golf course of Steyn City in Johannesburg is set to play champion host to a leading global golf event – LIV Golf South Africa from 20-22 March 2026.
What we have presented today as a detail account of our destination tourism performance is not just numbers or statistics from graphs and pie charts. These are direct results of our work in growing Gauteng together, the residue of the Gauteng economy that is dynamic and resilient.
As we celebrate this important month, allow me to extend the provincial government best regards to all the women of South Africa. Tourism is a sector that has one of the largest participation of women and young one’s in particular.
Issued by: Gauteng Tourism Authority
Barba Gaoganediwe, Spokesperson Gauteng Tourism
0834467844
[email protected]
@Barba_G74 on twitter
124 Main Street, Marshalltown, Johannesburg
www.gauteng.net
