FIFA World Cup™ Provides Strong Kick to South Africa Tourism Revenues

While Spain celebrated their first ever FIFA World CupTM championship on Sunday, host country South Africa was also celebrating the end of a successful tournament that saw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans descend upon the country. While blasting their vuvuzelas and celebrating their countries’ involvement in the FIFA World CupTM, international visitors have used their Visa cards to make a significant contribution to South Africa’s tourism revenues leading up to and during the month-long tournament.

According to new data on tourist spending in South Africa, during the period of June 1 – July 11, 2010 visitor spending by international visitors on their Visa-branded payment cards exceeded US$312 million (R2.4 billion), up 70 percent from US$184 million (R1.4 billion) during the same period in 2009. Other key highlights include:

  • Despite the fact their national teams were eliminated during the early stages of the tournament, international visitors from the United States, U.K., Australia and France comprised four of the top-five spenders within South Africa during the period June 1 – July 11, 2010.

  • The United States (19.05%) was followed by the United Kingdom (19.03%), Australia (4.7%), Brazil (4.2%) and France (3.4%) as the strongest contributors to visitor spending to date. These five countries alone accounted for 51 percent of spending.

  • Over 90 percent of spending was in typical leisure and business travel categories – accommodation, restaurants, retail, auto rental and air travel.

Visa is one of six global FIFA partners with exclusive global category rights through 2014, and was the exclusive card for the 2010 FIFA World CupTM. In recognition of Visa’s sponsorship of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South AfricaTM, Visa credit, debit and prepaid cards were the only payment cards accepted, along with cash, at all FIFA stadiums and the Onsite Stadium Merchandise Booths.

See you in Brazil in 2014!

http://ehotelier.com/

Posted by admin on Jul 17th, 2010 and filed under Hotelnews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

Leave a Reply