South Africa has announced a new scheme under which the Department of Home Affairs will process group visa applications for tourists coming into the country along with tested and approved tour operators from India and China registered with the department.
Aimed at attracting tourists from India and China to visit the top tourist destinations of the country, the Trusted Tour Operator Scheme (TTOS) is expected to come into force in January 2025.
The Trusted Tour Operator Scheme is aimed at helping the country to become a major tourist destination. Currently, Indian tourists account for only 3.9% of all international tourist arrivals to South Africa.
It is expected that the initiative will have the same success as the Trusted Employer Scheme (TES), which has significantly streamlined the visa process for businesses seeking to attract critical skills. Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has directed that a similar approach be taken to improve efficiency for tourists from countries like India and China.
Tourists coming in from countries like India and China prefer to travel in large groups and the new visa system is designed to meet this need.
The visa applications under TTOS are handled by a dedicated team of adjudicators, ensuring speedy and reliable processing. This new scheme aims to eliminate several obstacles that have hampered South Africa’s tourism potential.
The Department of Home Affairs, in collaboration with the Department of Tourism, the Presidency and Operation Vulindlela, is focused on addressing this “unacceptable economic underperformance” by removing barriers to tourism from these critical markets.
Minister Schreiber said that studies have shown that increasing tourism by just 10 percent per year could increase the country’s annual economic growth by 0.6 percent and create tens of thousands of new jobs for South Africans.
Schreiber hoped that the TTOS project would enable home businesses to flourish.
“TTOS is seen as an interim measure to promote tourism, but we are moving at a pace to digitally transform Home Affairs. Our vision is to enable a fully automated process to deliver tourist visa benefits digitally, to tourists worldwide,” he said.
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