The state of SA immigration has reached a point where reform is inevitable. Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and probably soon Namibia, offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival policies for Chinese visitors, the world’s largest tourism market.
SA’s e-visa regime is under severe strain. Only 3.2% of applications for e-visas, which are offered to India and China, are granted, the department of home affairs disclosed this year. Nearly 60% of rejected applications fail simply because they could not be processed by the date of travel.
Business owners and civil society have no choice but to push for the very best outcome the tourism industry could hope for: visa-free access for tourists from the I and C in Brics, as already offered to visitors from Brazil and Russia.
In 2018, Morocco doubled their Chinese visitor numbers from a basis similar to SA’s through the introduction of a visa-free policy. Assuming, not unreasonably, that SA could achieve the same results with Indian and Chinese visa-free tourist access, SA could gain as much as $950m (R17bn) in joint tourism revenues and new jobs over the next year as Asia begins to rediscover travel after the pandemic.
Despite many industry curveballs over the years, such as the unabridged birth certificate requirement in 2010, China and India contributed about 100,000 visitors in 2019, before the pandemic. Eliminating these impeding regulations would have made South Africans far wealthier in the past 10 years. Few numbers illustrate this better than average spend per visitor. Chinese outbound tourists spend about $3,000 in-destination each, excluding air tickets, putting them about on par with US tourists and far more than double the EU’s top spenders, the Germans and Swedes.
Lavish spenders
Indian outbound tourists, while spending only about $1,600 each on average, remain lavish by EU standards, and their tourism spending power in Africa is rising progressively. Wealthy Indians who opt for an overseas wedding spend on average far more than $500,000 a trip, excluding airfare, according to African tourism statistics and data analytics specialist Nrupesh Soni.
Trips such as these may bring with them as many as 250 guests at a time to destinations such as the Maldives, Vietnam or the Cape winelands. Factoring in the ease that a visa-free policy would bring to holiday and outbound wedding planning among some of the world’s most lavish spenders, the potential for market growth in the next year may be well more than $1bn for the SA tourism economy. After all, Australia (about equidistant to China) targets 2-million Chinese arrivals. SA certainly has the goods to compete with Australia on tourism offerings.
This market potential is overwhelming but the red carpet SA rolls out for these huge consumer markets is underwhelming: an overextended e-visa system, and particularly slow conventional, vignette-type visa processing times.
The rollout of the e-visa system initially introduced great confusion among Chinese travel agents, says Michael Jones, a South African working in the outbound Chinese tourism market.
“There are cases of agents successfully uploading their clients’ applications to the e-visa system, only to find a few days before departure that their application had not yet been approved,” he says.
Due to slow visa processing, agencies in China have become hesitant to promote any packages related to SA, even now as China is bouncing back with a vengeance after three years of pandemic travel bans.
Free capacity
Bookings to SA, tour operators say, cannot be processed without lead times of two to three months. This essentially takes SA off the menu for famously capricious Chinese travellers, a third of whom were found in 2019 market research to make travel bookings less than two weeks in advance of departure.
The solution is to free up capacity in overburdened immigration authorities, while injecting billions into the SA services sector and the fight against youth unemployment.
The 90-day visa-free status, which SA already affords to visitors from Brazil and Russia, should be extended to India and China to capitalise on the resurgent postpandemic travel economy.
There is simply not enough capacity to administer e-visa or even visa-on-arrival policies amid a crucial moment for the travel market.
Ethiopian Airlines and Cathay Pacific aim to radically increase flight connectivity between Cape Town, Johannesburg as well as Durban and big Indian and Chinese cities.
The China outbound market reopened in March, and bookings for the “golden weeks” of October and February 2024 are coming into play. With resurgent postpandemic travel, visa applications from China for the US and the Schengen area are now effectively full, encouraging Chinese visitors to try out more adventurous destinations such as Kenya and Egypt. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that SA embraces dynamism, international partnerships and wealth creation, and stops consenting to isolation, crisis and inertia.
Growth potential
Objections can be expected from those at ease with the current state of affairs. A chief objection might be the question of reciprocity: India grants SA a (functioning) e-visa system, but China requires a visa in advance of travel, and is likely to continue to do so, even if SA unilaterally abolishes visa requirements for the Chinese. Why should SA offer them visa-free access? Yet SA grants visa-free access to every Western European nation, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Australia, for 90 days — and only Ireland reciprocates with 90 days’ visa-free access for South Africans.
Naturally, hardly any of these nations come close to China in terms of in-destination spend, and they offer little upward room for market share growth. But China and India offer growth potential that may well outstrip these incumbent source markets combined in years to come.
What about security? Visa-free entry would diminish SA’s ability to screen people entering the country, predominantly via its airports. This is indeed a valid concern, and SA certainly has work to do in tightening border security, especially the northern land borders. Yet there is a clear trade-off to consider: does SA continue to sacrifice the billions of potential tourism revenues coming in from these markets, while joblessness among South Africans and millions of migrants from the rest of the continent persists?
Does SA have a distinct security concern that justifies effectively closing SA tourism off to the two largest economies in Brics, while offering Brazil and Russia 90 days’ visa free access, or is the current status quo simply the result of political inertia? SA’s Sadc neighbours do not seem to share these hypothetical security concerns, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival policies towards China and India being par for the course.
• Albertyn is a researcher on innovation policy and China-Africa relations, and advocates for positive policy change in SA. He worked in Beijing for several years with companies such as Alibaba and Standard Bank.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.