Following Statistics SA’s recently released June arrivals report, Tourism Update looks into the rapid decline of Chinese arrival numbers in 2018.
While June 2018 was better than the same month last year, the Chinese market has seen a 7% drop in overall arrival numbers for 2018. Terry Fenton-Wells, MD of SA Magic Tours says these numbers are accurate, adding: “It has been a particularly bad year.”
Fenton-Wells believes there are a few influencing factors. Firstly, a large portion of the mass-market is being enticed by other destinations. “We are losing a fair amount of business at the moment to Egypt and Turkey. They are aggressively targeting the Chinese mass-market with really low prices and the visa requirements are very simple and straightforward.” She says both countries are pulling themselves out of a particularly bad period, and are using mass-market tourism to do this. “In Egypt, for example, the economy revolves around tourism and they are making it as easy as possible for Chinese visitors and, of course, they are seeing results from this.
“Security is always an underlying factor but it does not seem to be having any more of an impact at the moment than before,” explains Fenton-Wells.
David Frost, CEO of the Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (Satsa) says these statistics are reflecting South Africa’s own self-inflicted regulatory impediments. He says visa requirements and licensing issues are not helping the industry. “However, it is important to remember the point made by Martin Wiest at Satsa’s conference: we are coming off two very strong years, so this current lull could be viewed somewhat as a market correction.”
At Satsa’s annual conference, in a pre-recorded interview with Frost, Tourism Minister Derek Hanekom said he was aiming to grow the Chinese market to 1 million visitors over the next five years. Both Frost and Fenton-Wells believe this will be difficult to achieve in our current climate, with Frost saying: “I would like to support it but we are not helping ourselves unless we address what is currently holding us back.”
Sisa Ntshona, CEO of South African Tourism, says: “The visa regime is something that is holding us back. We only have three people processing visas in the China office, therefore we can’t reach the capacity we should. It’s important to get the visa regime sorted out within the China market.” He elaborated further that South Africa should at the very least unlock the potential from ‘NIC’ countries (Nigeria, India and China). “What is happening now, however, is that the Minister Hanekom is telling us they are going through an entire review of countries across the world, but we are asking in the short term to just fix these three,” he explains. “China is the world’s second largest source economy. A small percentage of Chinese citizens actually have passports so it’s a growing space,” he adds.
However, the news is not all negative. Fenton-Wells reports growth in bookings for July and August. “We’ve seen an uptick. It is not back to normal levels, but there is definite growth,” she explains.
To look to the future, Ntshona warns: “If you don’t have a China plan, you are in trouble.”
