Tourism Breaking News
South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs’ ground-breaking digital platform for the Trusted Tour Operator Scheme (TTOS) has gone live. This platform will drive increased tourism from the major source markets of India and China by enabling vetted and approved tour operators to submit group applications for large tour groups from these two countries. This addresses a long-standing obstacle to tourism growth, whereby long queues, red tape and the inability to process group applications timeously led to inefficiency in the issuing of visas for tourists from these countries.
To illustrate the scale of the change: before TTOS was created, there were only two South African missions in China, and only two missions in India, to serve the 2.8 billion people living in those two countries who wanted to come as tourists to South Africa. But under the new TTOS digital-first system, tourists from India and China who use approved tour operators will no longer have to visit a mission, will no longer fill in a single form, will not need to stand in a single queue, and will receive their visas digitally within three days.
In 2023, South Africa only received 37 000 tourists from China and only 79 000 from India. By enhancing visa efficiency and security through TTOS, Home Affairs looks forward to enabling much faster tourism growth from these two burgeoning source markets. The Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Leon Schreiber, said: “The fact that Home Affairs took the TTOS from conceptualisation to implementation in less than six months demonstrates our commitment to embracing digital transformation and to playing our role as an economic enabler to create jobs. Research has shown that for every twelve new tourists attracted by TTOS, we can create one new job in South Africa. This demonstrates the power of Home Affairs’ digital transformation agenda to create jobs.”
