Off the Beaten Track Tour in Inner-City Johannesburg: A Supply-Side Perspective

A growing trend in European and North American cities is for tourists to move outside of the usual geographical spaces of tourism precincts and go ‘off the beaten track’. This paper contributes to international literature on ‘new urban tourism’ and off-the-beaten track tourism by examining this phenomenon in a major Global South urban tourism destination. Use is made of a range of methodologies. These include a systematic review of existing literature, examination of the specificities of historical urban economic restructuring in Johannesburg, and structured interviews with eight tour operators. Analysis of the suppliers of inner-city tours was undertaken to profile the development of tour enterprises, the different features of the tours, and the business challenges of tour operators including through the COVID-19 pandemic. It is shown that off the beaten track tours reintroduce tourism to spaces in central Johannesburg that formerly were the core of the historical development of tourism in the city and that these tours are part of the place-remaking and redevelopment initiatives for the inner-city.