Tourism Migration in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the tourism migration within the South African context, thereby focusing on the current dynamics, challenges and future prospects. Tourism and migration are significant towards globalisation. Almost all countries have jumped on the tourism bandwagon as a result of the positive economic benefits that include improving the balance of payments, attracting foreign exchange, and increasing state coffers through the taxation of non-residents. South Africa has also adopted tourism into the developmental policies. Although Africa's share of the global tourism market remains less than 10%, the continental bodies such as the African Union under the wing NEPAD recognises that tourism and migration as an important factor to societies. This paper adopts the content analysis to address the tourism migration, dynamics, challenges and future prospects as a critical phenomenon. Tourism has deep characteristics of a plantation economy that does not benefit the majority of the societies, particularly in South Africa. Despite being a geographical dispersed country, the tourism industry in South Africa faces numerous challenges such as the integration of Black South Africans as product owners; reported high rates of crimes, lack of integration of locals in the tourism industry, the lack of aviation competition, paucity of ports of entry, and most recently the cyber-crime and the visa regulations etc. However, South African tourism remains resilient as a major destination due to its fauna and flora and increasing market niches are developing such as adventure tourism, health tourism and volunteer tourism. South Africa plans to be one of the top 20 destinations by 2020; steps are in place to ensure that South Africa achieves this objective.