Johannesburg is rewriting its tourism playbook, shifting from basic city promotion to turning interest into instant bookings.
With visitor numbers hitting five million annually and driving over R106 billion in tourism spend for 2025/26, Joburg Tourism has teamed up with SATSA to launch the Welcome2Joburg Experience, a strategic initiative built to connect marketing directly to bookable local experiences and capture far greater economic value from the millions already passing through.
But the city faces a particular challenge: a significant proportion of those visits are driven by people visiting friends and relatives, while international travellers have often treated Johannesburg as a gateway to other destinations rather than a destination in its own right.
The new partnership is intended to address both issues by making it easier for visitors to discover, package and book experiences while they are in the city.
Belu Mabandla, executive head for destination marketing and events at Joburg Tourism, said the opportunity was less about attracting an entirely new visitor market and more about encouraging existing visitors to engage with the destination.
“The opportunity is less about attracting entirely new visitors and more about encouraging existing visitors to engage more deeply with the destination,” she said.
A visitor staying with family, for example, could also be encouraged to take a heritage tour, explore a township experience, follow an art route, attend a theatre performance, try a culinary experience or extend their stay by an additional night.
“The industry has traditionally assumed that visitors would discover these experiences on their own,” Mabandla added.
The partnership aims to change that by packaging experiences, making them bookable and promoting them through a coordinated destination marketing campaign.
From awareness to conversion
At the heart of Welcome2Joburg is a shift away from measuring tourism success primarily through awareness and arrivals.
Mabandla said destination marketing needed to provide consumers with a clear route from inspiration to purchase.
“Tourism marketing should not end at inspiration,” she said.
The initiative’s Experience Hub is intended to provide that connection, allowing consumers to move from seeing Johannesburg promoted to discovering relevant experiences and then towards an enquiry or booking.
For tourism businesses, particularly smaller operators, this could provide access to marketing and distribution networks that they may not be able to develop independently.
David Frost, CEO of SATSA, said the tourism industry needed to close the gap between creating interest in a destination and converting that interest into economic activity.
“Inspiration without a route to action has limited economic value,” Frost said.
He said consumers increasingly wanted curated ideas, clearly priced experiences, trusted providers and simple pathways to enquiry or booking.
The model also creates an opportunity to gather information about what visitors actually want.
According to Frost, the partnership will provide insight into which stories generate interest, which offers convert and where consumers abandon the journey.
That could allow tourism businesses and destination marketers to refine their products based on consumer behaviour rather than relying solely on awareness figures.
Selling Johannesburg beyond the stopover
The partnership also seeks to address Johannesburg’s longstanding position in international itineraries.
Despite its concentration of cultural, historical, artistic and culinary experiences, the city has frequently been treated as an arrival point or gateway to destinations elsewhere in South Africa.
Mabandla said Johannesburg had never lacked world-class experiences, but that they had not always been packaged in a way that made them straightforward for international travel companies to market and sell.
Frost said Johannesburg had often been “sold according to its function rather than its experience”.
The problem, he said, was not necessarily the absence of products, but the fragmentation of the city’s tourism offering.
Johannesburg has heritage, art, music, food, fashion, retail, entertainment, sport and urban experiences, but these need to be curated and distributed in ways that make them easy for both the travel trade and consumers to understand and purchase.
Perceptions of safety and longstanding narratives about the city have also influenced how international itineraries are designed, Frost said.
The partnership therefore aims to create a stronger alternative proposition by connecting Johannesburg’s experiences to established tourism distribution networks.
Bringing international operators into the equation
SATSA represents more than 500 inbound tour operators that have undergone its annual verification process.
Their involvement is intended to bring Johannesburg’s tourism products directly into the international travel trade.
Mabandla said this would allow operators to create experiences that encourage travellers to spend two or three nights in the city rather than simply passing through.
Those experiences could include heritage tourism, food and wine, contemporary culture, sporting events, shopping and urban exploration.
For Frost, the value of SATSA’s network extends beyond its size.
Tour operators understand the commercial requirements of international buyers, including pricing, contracting, transport, capacity, safety information and service consistency.
Their involvement could therefore help local tourism businesses become more market-ready while making Johannesburg easier to incorporate into existing Southern African itineraries.
A one-night transit stop could become a two- or three-night city experience, while Johannesburg could also become the opening chapter of a South African holiday, an extension after a safari or an event-linked stay.
A test of whether Joburg can capture more value from existing visitors
The partnership comes at a time when traveller behaviour is increasingly shaped by experiences, convenience and digital booking.
Mabandla said visitors were looking for authentic experiences while also expecting greater convenience throughout the booking process.
For Johannesburg, that creates an opportunity to move beyond simply telling potential visitors why they should come.
The challenge is to show them what they can do once they arrive, how the experiences fit together, who they can book with and how they can extend their stay.
Frost said Johannesburg already had the visitors and the experiences.
“The opportunity now is to connect the two more deliberately, turning arrivals into exploration, stopovers into stays, and destination interest into measurable economic activity,” he said.
For a city that already attracts millions of visitors, the success of Welcome2Joburg will therefore depend less on whether people know Johannesburg exists and more on whether those visitors can be persuaded to stay longer, explore further and spend more of their travel budget in the city.
zamandosi.cele@nationalmg.co.za