Coastal Tourism in South Africa: A Geographical Perspective

For tourism geographers, coastal tourism is a major focus of international research. In South Africa, however, there has been a relative oversight by local tourism geographers on coastal destinations. The policy environment concerning coastal tourism in South Africa is changing with new policy interventions and debates around the blue economy. Against this backdrop, the chapter provides an examination of coastal tourism in South Africa from a geographical perspective. The study is the first to map out the size, complexion and spatial distribution of coastal tourism in South Africa on the basis of investigating the 15 district and metropolitan municipalities that adjoin the national coastal line. Arguably, the contribution of coastal areas to South Africa’s tourism economy is in relative decline. Existing coastal tourism is geographically concentrated upon the two major coastal metropolitan areas. In addition, different geographies are revealed for different types of tourism, namely leisure as opposed to business or VFR travel and for domestic as opposed to international travel. The research discloses that coastal tourism is polarizing and is increasingly an urban phenomenon in South Africa. The uneven geographical impacts of coastal tourism raise a number of policy concerns about the need for strategic interventions to spread more widely the impacts of coastal tourism in the country.