Foreign arrivals at South Africa's ports rose 17.3% month on month to more than 1.27 million in July, 6% up on the same month last year, Stats SA reported on Wednesday.

Almost all of them, 97.5%, came on holiday, against 1.9% here on business. SADC visitors made up 79.2% of the total, led by Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, while overseas travellers accounted for 19.5%.

The two cohorts arrive differently and spend differently. SADC tourists come predominantly by road, with only 6.5% flying, entering mainly through Lebombo in Mpumalanga and then Beitbridge.

Overseas visitors are the mirror image, with more than 91% arriving by air through OR Tambo and Cape Town, and the US, UK and Netherlands together supplying 41% of that segment.

That distinction matters because of what we found in Yoco's spend data earlier this year: American visitors were the highest spenders at R627 a transaction, more than double the local average, and left nearly half of all tips recorded over the festive season.

So the volume is regional and arrives on tar, while the value is long-haul and arrives on a runway. Stats SA puts tourism at 954,000 direct jobs in 2024 and 4.9% of GDP, ahead of agriculture, utilities and construction.

Business Day reported the figures and noted the anti-immigrant protests of late June appear not to have deterred visits, reaffirming its own earlier finding on the June slowdown. At the launch of phase three of the government-business partnership on 20 August, Cyril Ramaphosa called tourism one of the fastest ways to generate jobs across a wide range of skills, and named the barriers holding it back: air access, visa processing, destination marketing, tourist safety and infrastructure investment.

Ramaphosa's barrier list is right as far as it goes. But there is a leak nobody named. As we covered yesterday, roughly 7% of every foreign card booking vanishes into merchant and currency fees before the money lands, against the R113.9bn international visitors spend here annually, because South Africa has no cap on consumer card interchange the way Europe does.

Ninety per cent of tourist transactions run on foreign cards, and European cards are three times more likely to decline. That is the highest-yield cohort, the 19.5% arriving by air, losing value at the till.

Fixing visas gets more of them through the door. Fixing the payment rails decides how much of their money actually stays here.

You might also like our piece on the SA ETA launch and what it does and does not fix on visas, why inDrive's Panorama View launched in South Africa before anywhere else, and how Yoco's SME operating system is chasing the merchants taking that spend.

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