South Africa has never welcomed as many foreign visitors as it did in 2025. Stats SA counted 10,498,506 arrivals, 17.7% more than in 2024 and just past the previous record, set in 2018. Yet in its latest tourism trends report, the advisory firm BDO puts a price on the visitors who did not come: an estimated R6.5 billion in foreign spending missed in 2025 alone.
The visitors who spend the most
The record was built close to home. Arrivals from the rest of Africa are running 17% above their 2019 level, BDO says. Overseas visitors, the ones from outside Africa who spend the most per head, are still short of where they were before the pandemic, about 5% below 2019 over the first seven months of this year.
The R6.5 billion is BDO's estimate of what that shortfall cost: the direct tourist spending lost because overseas arrivals stayed below their 2019 level. BDO has not published how it priced the missing visitors, which makes it an estimate rather than an audited loss. It has also grown. In January, Lee-Anne Bac, a director in BDO's advisory services, put the loss for the same year at R5 billion.
China and India, still far from 2019
BDO calls China and India perhaps the starkest cautionary tales. Only 18,000 Chinese visitors arrived in the first seven months of 2026, 67% fewer than in 2019, even with a scheme that lets approved tour operators get visas through in five days. Australia, by comparison, welcomed more than a million Chinese visitors in 2025. Indian arrivals are 49% below 2019, and BDO points to limited direct flights and the crisis in the Middle East.
Other destinations have pulled ahead. BDO's data, as reported by Business Day, has Morocco and South Africa level a decade ago, at about 10 million visitors a year each. Last year Morocco drew 17 million, and Tunisia, then a distant third, drew 11 million. Morocco's own tourism ministry counts Moroccans living abroad as arrivals too.
Bac does not expect the old industry to come back, and says that on current performance South Africa is not set up for the tougher competition, except perhaps in places like Cape Town and the upmarket game lodges. The government wants 15 million tourists by 2030. The record South Africa has just set is about four and a half million short of that.
