South Africa closed out 2025 with its strongest tourism year on record, a milestone still shaping the industry’s outlook well into 2026. Close to 10.5-million international visitors arrived last year, a rise of nearly 18% on 2024 and the highest figure ever recorded for the country. By any measure, it marks a remarkable comeback for a sector that was on its knees only a few years ago.
Industry data tells a more complicated story beneath that headline. Cape Town and the Kruger National Park now account for close to 70 percent of all tourist bed nights nationally, up from 60% before the pandemic. Both destinations are now widely described, in the industry’s own language, as operating at or near capacity, a polite way of saying they are full. Meanwhile, other regions have watched their share of the market shrink rather than grow. At a recent industry conference, one destination management company reported its KwaZulu-Natal business down by nearly 50 percent, a startling figure for a province that includes some of the country’s most spectacular and least visited landscapes.
“The Northern Drakensberg Nature Reserve is an expression of the truth that we are all inextricably connected to one another, that our individual wellbeing is reliant on the wellbeing of the people and the environment that surrounds us,” says Loretta Mecklenborg, secretary of the Northern Drakensberg Landowners Association. “. We do not exist in a vacuum of individual prosperity.
“Through their willingness to collaborate and co-operate, the owners of the properties making up the Reserve have set up a structure where this very special part of South Africa can be protected in perpetuity. Spending time in the space is restorative on a deep level, and we encourage and welcome visitors to experience this first hand.”
South Africa recorded its best tourism year in history in 2025 while simultaneously concentrating that success into an ever-smaller footprint of the country, and those two facts sitting side by side should give the industry pause. The real issue is not Cape Town or Kruger. It is where decades of marketing budgets and flight routes have been directed, and how much of the rest of the country has been left off the itinerary as a result.
Few regions illustrate that blind spot more starkly than the Drakensberg. Gazetted in April 2024, the Northern Drakensberg Nature Reserve is KwaZulu-Natal’s newest protected area, a 6500-hectare conservation corridor linking the Sterkfontein Nature Reserve in the Free State with the uKhahlamba Drakensberg World Heritage Site. Built through collaboration between private landowners and conservation bodies, it stands as one of the most significant conservation achievements in Southern Africa in recent years and yet receives a fraction of the visitors who pass through the Cape Peninsula in a single month.
Lindsay du Plessis and Megan Bedingham, owners of the Carte Collection, which includes The Cavern, established in 1941, alongside Montusi Mountain Lodge and Sungubala Eco Camp, have spent years watching that gap up close.
“For generations this has been one of the most beautiful parts of the country, and remarkably few people beyond our borders know it exists,” says Du Plessis. “It deserves to be understood for what it actually is, not as a footnote to somewhere else, but as one of the great landscapes of this continent.”
Tourism in the Drakensberg has long been studied as a mechanism for rural development, and the Northern Drakensberg Nature Reserve was built with that principle written into its founding purpose. Alongside conservation, water security and the preservation of cultural heritage, socio-economic upliftment in the surrounding community is named as one of the reserve’s core objectives, a recognition that this landscape exists as much for the people who live around it as for the land itself. Properties within it already employ local people across hospitality, guiding and conservation work, the kind of opportunity that depends entirely on visitors choosing to come.
Bedingham, co-owner of the Carte Collection, sees that potential most clearly through the Royal Drakensberg Education Trust, the non-profit she and Lindsay founded to support local schools in the surrounding communities. “Every guest who books a stay here is, whether they realise it or not, helps train a teacher, feed a child, stimulate a baby, and much more,” she says. “We set up the Royal Drakensberg Education Trust because interventions in the early years help build a much stronger community and as members of this community, we need to part of its future.”
Thobani Ndlovu, head of school at the Royal Drakensberg Education Trust, sees the daily reality of that support: “I see it every day in the children who come through our doors. A booking made hundreds of kilometres away becomes a meal, a textbook, a teacher who stays because we can pay them properly. That is what keeps me believing this work matters.”
South Africa has set a target of 15-million visitors by 2030, an ambitious figure that will not be met by simply funnelling ever more travellers into the same two or three places. The country does not appear to have a tourism shortage. What the data increasingly suggests is a geography problem, one that is largely self-inflicted, and one that is entirely fixable. Regions like the Drakensberg are not waiting to be discovered because they lack what it takes. They are waiting because South Africa’s tourism conversation has not yet looked up from the map it already knows.