By Thapelo Molefe
Mpumalanga is attracting millions of tourists but is struggling to turn those arrivals into longer stays and meaningful spending, with safety concerns, poor mobility, limited tourism products and weak coordination across government undermining its tourism economy.
The province attracted about 2.7 million visitors in 2025, but tourism industry leaders say the number of arrivals has not translated into enough spending, jobs and broader economic benefits.
Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (Satsa) national chairperson Oupa Pilane said Mpumalanga’s biggest challenge was no longer attracting tourists but finding ways to keep them in the province for longer and encouraging them to spend more.
“Our challenge is how do we manage Mpumalanga as a complete destination,” Pilane said.
Speaking at the Mpumalanga Tourism Expo in Mbombela, Pilane said the province had a governance problem that was affecting other parts of the tourism sector.
“Because the governance is not functional…it then affects all the other components of tourism,” he said.
Pilane, who is also co-founder and director of the Graskop Gorge Lift Company, said about 2.7 million visitors came to the province in 2025, but only about 8% of visitor spending was being captured locally.
“What does that translate to? It says for every R100 that everybody has, they only spend R8 in the province,” he said.
He said Mpumalanga needed to stop measuring its tourism success mainly by the number of people arriving and instead focus on how much economic value those visitors generated.
The same concern was raised by Beacon Africa Tourism Consultancy CEO Nomasonto Ndlovu, who said the province did not have a demand problem but a conversion problem.
Ndlovu said Mpumalanga recorded R8.5 billion in tourism spend from the 2.7 million arrivals in 2025, while comparing the province with Limpopo, which she said generated R5 billion from far fewer arrivals.
She said the focus should therefore be on getting visitors to stay longer, spend more and make use of tourism products outside the main attractions.
The problem was evident in accommodation, she said, with 90.8% of visitors staying with friends and family, while only 4.5% stayed in game lodges and 1.5% in hotels.
She said the province needed to give visitors more reasons to spend additional nights.
“We don’t need a new traveller, we need money,” Ndlovu said.
Pilane said poor visitor mobility was one of the practical problems preventing tourists from leaving their hotels and lodges to explore the province and spend money at local businesses.
He said many tourists arrived in Mpumalanga through tour operators and buses, which meant they often followed fixed itineraries. Once they reached their accommodation, however, they had few safe and convenient options if they wanted to go somewhere outside the itinerary.
He used the example of a tourist staying at a hotel who wanted to visit a local shisanyama but had no easy way of getting there.
“Mobility becomes a problem and then it becomes a safety issue,” Pilane said.
He said visitors needed to be able to move safely between hotels, restaurants, attractions and other businesses, rather than being forced to walk on roads or rely on potentially unsafe transport.
Pilane said the lack of e-hailing services in Mpumalanga was not only a transport problem but also a tourism and economic problem because visitors who could not move around the province had fewer opportunities to spend money outside their accommodation.
He said the tourism industry had raised the lack of e-hailing with government for years and had now made it one of the priorities in the proposed Mpumalanga Tourism Growth Partnership.
He added that the issue could not be left to the tourism department because transport licensing involved the Department of Transport, while municipalities also had responsibility for roads and other infrastructure.
“It is not the tourism department that licences transport. It is the department of transport. And also it is not the department of transport alone. It is the municipality also,” he said.
Ndlovu said safety also affected how visitors behaved and how long they stayed.
“A visitor who feels safe will stay longer,” she said.
She identified contact crime, fake fines and roadside bribery on the N4, illegal mining, deteriorating tourism products, community conflict, labour unrest and governance-related headlines among issues affecting the province’s tourism reputation.
She said visitors who felt unsafe were less likely to move around, spend time outside their accommodation or add extra nights to their trips.
Pilane said the province had world-class attractions but was failing to develop enough products around them to turn visitors into consumers.
He described Mpumalanga as a “showroom” where tourists could view scenery and wildlife, take photographs, and leave without spending significant amounts of money.
Using God’s Window as an example, he said visitors could pay an entrance fee but had limited opportunities to spend additional money once inside.
“If you are thirsty in God’s Window, you are in trouble. If you are hungry in God’s Window, you are in trouble,” he said.
Pilane said the Graskop Gorge had experienced a similar situation before developing additional activities around the attraction.
Visitors previously arrived, took photographs and left. The introduction of additional experiences created more opportunities for visitors to stay and spend, with Pilane saying the average visitor now spends at least R500.
“We need to replicate the Gorge in all our attractions to see what it is that we can put there that would increase value and also make sure that the tourists spend,” he said.
He said vendors operating around attractions also needed to diversify their products instead of selling the same goods and competing by cutting prices.
“The biggest challenge that we have in the Panorama is that they all sell the same thing,” he said.
Pilane said developing different products at different attractions would create more opportunities for visitors to spend money while also increasing benefits for surrounding communities.
Pilane also raised concerns about Mpumalanga’s failure to connect visitors to the Kruger National Park with other parts of the province.
He said about 1.9 million people visited the park, but the province had not developed a sufficiently coordinated strategy to encourage those visitors to explore nearby towns and tourism businesses.
“We’ve never had a strategy. They are already there, 1.9 million people in the Kruger National Park,” he said.
He said towns such as Bushbuckridge had accommodation businesses located close to the park but were not benefiting sufficiently from the visitor numbers.
“How do we convert the Kruger visitor into a Mpumalanga visitor?” he asked.
He said the province needed to deliberately connect the Kruger National Park with other attractions, towns and cultural experiences so visitors could extend their trips beyond the park.
Pilane said the tourism sector wanted government to stop treating tourism as the responsibility of one department.
He proposed shifting from a tourism development approach to a broader destination development model involving departments responsible for safety, transport, roads, infrastructure and social services.
“When you move to a destination development approach, you are now not limiting tourism to the Department of Tourism,” he said.
“You are bringing everyone that directly or indirectly has something to do with tourism.”
He said the private sector had proposed a Mpumalanga Tourism Growth Partnership to the Office of the Premier, with the aim of bringing different government departments and the tourism industry together.
Pilane said the premier had accepted the proposal and would receive a quarterly dashboard tracking key deliverables.
“We don’t want a strategy, colleagues. We want a dashboard,” he said.
“What is the programme? Who is responsible? Who is going to deliver it? When? And that’s it.”
The proposed partnership would focus on 12 areas, including visitor growth, air access, e-hailing, visitor mobility, roads and infrastructure, tourism attractions, public investment and project preparation.
Pilane said the intention was to ensure that tourism plans translated into actual projects and measurable results.
Pilane said improving tourism could have an impact well beyond hotels, lodges and attractions, creating opportunities in construction, agriculture, retail, manufacturing, transport, media, education and energy.
“If we get our tourism right and there is development, there is not even a minimum of 20 catalytic projects in the province for tourism,” he said.
“When they are ready, that will be construction, that will be marketing, that will be electricity, that will be transport, that will be opportunities.”
He also called for tourism businesses to become more involved in shaping the sector and for government to measure the economic impact of programmes rather than simply counting the number of people trained.
“We are no longer wanting to measure training. We want to measure spend,” he said.
Pilane said the province also needed to develop towns themselves as tourism destinations instead of relying only on individual attractions.
“We need to make the town itself the attraction,” he said.
He cited Dullstroom as an example and said Graskop could be developed as a tourism town, with the longer-term proposal of establishing the Panorama Route as a tourism special economic development zone.
Pilane said the province already had the attractions and visitor numbers needed to grow its tourism economy.
The challenge, he said, was removing the barriers that prevent those visitors from staying longer, spending more and contributing to local economic development.
“We have a beautiful province. Are there things to enjoy in the province? There’s a lot of things to enjoy in the province,” he said.
“All we need to do, like any other destination in the country, is to sort out those things that we have identified as a barrier to translating this tourism as a serious economic growth that will create jobs and deal with issues of poverty.”
INSIDE METROS
Post Views: 205
Inside Metros
insidemetros.co.za
