Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille has reiterated her call for the revision of visa regulations, specifically highlighting the implementation of visa enhancements like the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) and the Trusted Tour Operator Scheme (TTOS).
Speaking on the side-lines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg, De Lille insisted that the changes in the visa regulations will focus on simplifying processes for tourists from key markets like China and India to boost tourism, support economic growth, and create jobs.
She said that Tourism has strongly featured in some of the declarations made at the Summit.
“Tourism is certainly part of the declaration, and again as the G20 countries we have committed ourselves to continue to work together to innovate, to invest and to make sure that we improve air access and make travel seamless for our visitors, and deal with the reforms in our visa regulations,” said De Lille.
The minister said that Tourism must always be the biggest winner, with hotels in and around Soweto and Sandton fully booked for the duration of the Summit.
She attributed the successful marketing of the hospitality sector to the work done prior to the Summit during more than 135 working group meetings and ministerial meetings which were held in the country.
Furthermore, the minister said that she has entered a partnership with the private sector and together formulated a tourism partnership plan which will make sure all the covenants are fully implemented to realise jobs that tourism can create.
“We are fortunately in the summer season that kicked off in September so at least a lot of temporary jobs created during this season will be sustained until early next year.
We must do more to ensure that we absorb especially semi-skilled, unskilled young people and train them to keep them within the Tourism sector.
Already in the past nine months we have grown by 1.9 million tourists, and the more tourists come the more jobs we can create,” explained De Lille.
