South Africa's top tourism minister believes that China will rank among the top three markets for tourist arrivals by 2010 as the African state moves to capture a greater share of the surging number of Chinese outbound tourists.<\/p>\n
South Africa's hosting of the 2010 Football World Cup is expected to be a key draw for Chinese tourists especially if their national team qualifies in the run up.<\/p>\n
Recent figures from the World Tourism Organisation point to as many as 130 million Chinese outbound tourists by 2020, making it the largest market in Asia. Tourism to South African is currently dominated by arrivals from Germany, UK and the United States, but heavy investments on promoting South Africa tourism in China has led to solid growth in Chinese travellers.<\/p>\n
In 2004, around 52,000 Chinese visitors traveled to South Africa. In the first two weeks of this year South Africa issued over 2,000 visas to Chinese nationals, more than double that of 2004.<\/p>\n
A recent market survey conducted by South African Tourism (SAT) also reflects the growing interest in South Africa as a prime destination for Chinese tourists with more than 30 million respondents stating a \u00e2\u0080\u009cgreat interest\u00e2\u0080? in South Africa and that they would put it top of their destination list. South Africa's 2010 hosting of the World Cup will offer a fantastic one-off opportunity to broaden the country's appeal as a tourist destination. The tournament, which will be held in June and July, will offer an immediate benefit by attracting visitors in the tourist low-season<\/p>\n
\"We are aiming for 2.5 million Chinese visitors every year to South Africa. To accomplish this, South Africa's government has placed a high priority on tourist and tourism related industries. As a key generator of employment in South Africa this will have numerous spin-off benefits in terms of trade and investment,\" said Manqoba Nyembezi, Tourism Attache of South African Embassy in China.<\/p>\n
Aside from attracting individual tourists, South Africa has developed a reputation for being an exceptional meetings, incentives, conferences and events (MICE) destination. South Africa offers many unique MICE-related tourism attractions, such as the country's sophisticated business facilities and rich cultural adventures at diversified provincial tourism sites and South Africa's seven World Heritage sites.<\/p>\n
More than just a tourist destination, South Africa also provides an economic development environment ripe for bilateral economic exchange. Since two countries established diplomatic relations in 1998, South Africa has become China's top trading partner in Africa with a growing trade volume of US$7.3 billion in 2005. From an investment perspective, the total volume of two-way investment between China and South Africa was over US$500 million in 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South Africa's top tourism minister believes that China will rank among the top three markets for tourist arrivals by 2010 as the African state moves to capture a greater share of the surging number of Chinese outbound tourists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12723],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}