Tourists keep on coming to SA

This compares with a 5.6% y/y rise in February to 715‚769‚ with the number of overseas tourists increasing by 12.0% y/y to 240‚387‚ while in January there was a 4.2% y/y gain in tourist arrivals to 887‚066‚ with the number of overseas tourists increasing by 3.8% y/y to 210‚253.

A total of 9.2m international tourists came to SA last year‚ compared with 8.3m in 2011. In 2012 tourists spent R76.4bn‚ a 7.6% increase over spending in 2011.

Last year China jumped from being SA's eighth-largest market in 2011 to being the fourth largest.

The distribution of overseas tourists in March was as follows;

• Europe‚ 152‚534 (61.3%);
• North America‚ 36‚431 (14.6%);
• Asia‚ 33‚970 (13.6%);
• Australasia‚ 10‚991 (4.4%);
• Central and South America‚ 10‚642 (4.3%);

• Middle East‚ 4‚441 (1.8%).

The leading source countries for overseas tourists were the UK (19.5%); Germany‚ (14.3%); US‚ (11.8%); France‚ (5.4%); China‚ (5.2%); Australia‚ (3.7%); India‚ (3.4%); the Netherlands‚ (3.4%); Canada‚ (2.9%) and Brazil‚ (2.6%).

Tourists from these 10 countries constituted 72.1% of all tourists from overseas countries.

A comparison between March this year and March last year showed that the number of tourists increased in all the 10 leading overseas countries. China had the highest increase of 28.8%‚ while Canada had the smallest increase of 2.2%.