Boston, MA -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/31/2013 -- Since the last quarterly report, South Africa's Department of Tourism has released final tourist arrivals figures for 2012. These showed overseas (i.e. non-African) arrivals growth of 15.1%, to reach 2,505,762. Including African arrivals, total arrivals stood at 9,188,368, up by 10.2% y-o-y.

These strong arrivals figures bear out BMI's continued optimism towards the South African tourism sector at present. Our forecasts currently call for 9% growth in arrivals over 2013, and a further 36% increase in arrivals over the 2013-17 period, to reach almost 13.3mn total arrivals.

Europe remained South Africa's highest source of overseas (non-African) tourist arrivals in 2012, with arrivals from the continent up by 9.5% y-o-y, notwithstanding the economic difficulties still being faced by many European states.

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President Jacob Zuma said that the government is 'extremely happy' with the 2012 figures and the continued growth in arrivals from all regions. He added that South Africa's 'reputation as a friendly, welcoming, inspiring and unique tourism destination continues to grow'.

Encouragingly for the longer-term development of the industry, there was strong growth from global emerging markets, such as regional Africa, Asia and South America, backed up by continued strength from the core overseas markets of Europe and North America.

International tourism receipts stood at ZAR76.4bn in 2012, up by 7.6% y-o-y, underlining the bullish state of inbound tourism demand at the present time.

On the back of this strong 2012 performance, BMI is also upbeat on other industry metrics. We are currently forecasting the value of South Africa's hotels and restaurants industry to increase by a strong 49% in US dollar terms over the 2013-2017 period, to reach US$13.64bn. In GDP terms, the contribution of the hotels and restaurants industry to overall GDP will rise from 2.38% in 2013, to 2.77% in 2017, underlining our upbeat stance on the South African tourism industry over the medium term.

An overview of South Africa's Top 10 inbound tourism markets highlights the fact that it remains heavily dependent on neighbouring sub-Saharan African states (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana) for the bulk of its arrivals. One key challenge for South Africa, therefore, will be to boost the numbers of tourists arriving from higher-income nations over the coming years. The World Cup was a major revenue generator in this regard, although there is some concern that overinflated prices for accommodation and flights during the tournament could damage South Africa's prospects of enticing tourists back. It is also worth adding that the political and economic instability in neighbouring Zimbabwe remains an ongoing threat to South African tourism.

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