As CEO of Cape Town Tourism, I believe we need to be more honest with ourselves. Tourism leaders are often quick to celebrate growth and slow to question its impact.



That is a problem.

Cape Town’s latest Economic Value of Tourism figures put direct tourism spend at R24.5 billion and tourism-supported employment at 106,707 jobs. To put that into perspective, if you had to spend R1 every second, it would take about 776 years to get through that amount. That is serious value, and it deserves serious thinking.

But growth, on its own, is not success.

If Cape Town gets busier but not better, then something is wrong.

This is also why we need to be more careful about how we throw around the term "over-tourism".

Understanding pressure versus perception

Cape Town International Airport recorded 11.1 million two-way passenger movements in 2025, including 3.3 million international and 7.8 million domestic passengers.

Against a city population of roughly five million, that sounds dramatic, and if all of those passengers arrived at once, it would be. But spread across a year, that works out to roughly 30,400 passenger movements a day, or about 0.6% of the city’s population per day.

Even the roughly 2.4 million overnight tourists recorded annually translates to about 6,575 tourists a day, around 0.13% of the population. So, Cape Town’s challenge is not a simple citywide over-tourism story.

It is concentration, uneven benefit, pressure in specific places, and whether tourism growth is being managed intelligently enough.

Why responsible tourism matters

That is exactly why responsible tourism matters.

Not as a slogan.
Not as a side conversation.
And not as something we talk about once the “real” work is done.
This is the real work.

Responsible tourism is the discipline that helps a destination grow without slowly damaging the place, people, and experiences that make it valuable in the first place.

And if we are honest, tourism is very good at looking busy while avoiding harder questions.

Campaign launched.
Workshop held.
Stakeholders engaged.
Content published.

Fine. Then what changed?
Did more value stay local?
Did more neighbourhood businesses benefit?
Did more people feel included in the visitor economy?
Did the city get stronger because tourism was growing?

Those are the questions that matter now.

From activity to real impact

At Cape Town Tourism, for example, we are already doing work that points in the right direction through Future Leaders in Tourism, neighbourhood storytelling, Limitless Cape Town, and practical support for communities and SMEs.

In the latest annual cycle, we engaged 16 schools, 696 learners, 61 teachers, and 7 colleges, while Ekasi and small-business support sessions reached almost 100 business owners. We have also directed millions of rand in cash and in-kind support toward SMEs to help accelerate local business growth.

That matters. But it is still not enough to point to activity and call it impact.

Take Bo-Kaap and Langa. When residents raise concerns about tourism pressure, identity, gentrification, too little local benefit, and too little real market access for local tourism businesses, the issue is not whether we can produce a better response.

The issue is whether we are genuinely listening to understand or simply listening long enough to defend the status quo.

They are not the same thing, and communities can tell the difference.

If a community tells us tourism is adding pressure without enough shared benefit, that is not a branding issue. It is a leadership issue.

What better tourism must look like

Cape Town should absolutely remain ambitious about tourism growth. But the more useful north star cannot simply be bigger arrival numbers. It has to be better tourism: more jobs, more viable SMEs, more local value, broader participation, and less pressure-heavy concentration.

In other words, the real question is not only how much tourism we grow.

It is the kind of tourism that makes Cape Town stronger as it grows.

That is why responsible tourism is not anti-growth. It is the growth discipline this city needs.

Because for Cape Town, it is no longer enough to ask whether tourism is growing. We also need to ask whether Cape Town is better off because it is growing. If the answer is still unclear, then the real work of leadership lies there.

 

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