Mind the Gap: Wesgro says fixing transit deficits could add up to 1 million visitors by 2035
Improving access and connectivity across the province is one of the key interventions needed to expand Western Cape tourism, according to the Western Cape Tourism, Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Wesgro).
Detailing insights from their Unlocking Tourism Growth Project, which is currently being finalised, at a Cape Chamber of Commerce event last week, Wesgro said realising the region's full economic potential would involve close coordination across the ecosystem, including the public and private sectors, as well as resolving physical transit bottlenecks, while ensuring inclusive growth in the province’s regions.
Global benchmarking of destinations, including Chile, Kenya, New Zealand, Singapore, Melbourne, and Valencia, demonstrates that the most successful destinations actively design and manage tourism growth, Wesgro said. Leading destinations align marketing, connectivity, infrastructure, destination development and governance into a single coordinated system.
Air access is the primary economic pipeline for international market expansion, and infrastructure investment is needed to sustain this growth. Cape Town International Airport and George Airport's capacity to manage increased demand will therefore be essential. Without expanded physical capacity and additional confirmed flight routes, arrival growth would be impacted.
Wesgro's presentation also highlighted the importance of enabling mobility across the province so visitors can explore beyond the obvious Mother City and Winelands attractions. Beyond the metro, inter-town connectivity is largely non-existent, the presentation says. The Cape Winelands lacks dedicated public or integrated transit connecting key nodes like Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, and Paarl, while the Garden Route similarly lacks reliable, shared inter-town transit networks. Rebuilding and modernising passenger rail lines, such as PRASA’s Southern Line to Simon's Town, offers a major opportunity to shift traffic off congested roads if it is safely integrated with tourism transit.
Beyond fixing core transit networks, a central pillar of Wesgro's approach is actively driving regional spread by enabling the tourism ecosystem outside of the City.
However, uneven development across the province currently hinders this geographic spread. In regions like the Cape Karoo and West Coast (Weskus), where vast space, unique heritage, and distinct natural assets exist, tourism ecosystems remain underdeveloped. Key limitations in these outlying areas include a scarcity of mid-to-high-tier accommodation, limited formal visitor experiences, poor digital visibility for local operators, and long travel distances poorly supported by tourism infrastructure or reliable transport.
To build a resilient, province-wide visitor economy, future interventions include a focus on targeted experience development in the Karoo and West Coast to convert passive drives into multi-day stays. This requires equipping small-town tourism businesses with digital tools and capability training so regional offerings can be discovered globally, alongside establishing structured road corridors that seamlessly link mature gateways to emerging rural destinations.
The presentation's overarching message was that tourism growth must be designed, not assumed. “Success will depend on the province's ability to attract visitors, improve the systems that support them, and ensure that tourism benefits are spread more widely across communities, regions, and businesses throughout the Western Cape,” said Russel Brueton, Wesgro's Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer.