16 August 2005
South African tourism is booming - and it's all thanks to South Africans. The country's people are taking more and more holidays at home, exploring the diverse places and scenery South Africa has to offer.
According to the Sunday Independent, the number of people visiting the Kruger National Park has risen to 1.3-million - 73% of them South African.
Park spokesperson Raymond Travers says South Africans' new interest in the park is because they have become "more travel-ready". It's also a result of SA Tourism's Sho't Left campaign, which markets the country as a tourist destination for its own people.
"The Sho't Left campaign is certainly working, and the Kruger National Park is a major component of that campaign," Travers told the Sunday Independent.
Sho't Left aims to stimulate domestic tourism in South Africa's emerging travel market, and has already increased local tourism by 20%.
SA Tourism aims to increase the number of domestic tourists to at least 50% of all tourists in South Africa by 2008.
Travers says the number of black South Africans visiting Kruger has grown from 7% to 12% in the past three years.
"It's a goal for SANparks as a whole to increase these numbers, so that national parks are not just a whites-only domain," he told the newspaper. "Our parks are for all South Africans."
The Kruger Park has launched "intensive marketing campaigns using traditionally black media", Travers says, and is "trying to find products for the black market".
Black visitors "tend to go for luxury riverside bungalows, while whites go for traditional accommodation - our fitted tents, or they bring their own tents".
He says day visitor numbers have increased because it has become more affordable since the introduction of the Wild Card scheme. For only R170, a Wild Card allows unlimited visits to the park for a year.
According to the Sunday Independent, tourism is South Africa's fourth-largest industry, contributing R93.6-billion to the country's gross domestic product in 2004. Of this, domestic tourism contributed about R47-billion.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
