Visiting friends and relatives travel: A spatial perspective on South Africa

Abstract

Despite being a major component in contemporary global tourism, VFR travel has attracted – at least until recently – only limited scholarly attention from tourism researchers. This paper represents a contribution to the small international scholarship on VFR travel in the context of the Global South. The novel contributions of this article are twofold. First, it offers a longitudinal analysis of VFR travel over a period of two decades (2002-2024) and reveals the changing status of VFR in South African tourism as a whole. Second, the paper unpacks the geography of VFR travel and in this regard represents one of the few studies which have addressed the spatial dimensions of VFR travel. Overall, the findings confirm the dominance of VFR trips in South Africa’s tourism economy. As indexed by the volume of flows, the results pinpoint the country’s large metropolitan areas as the leading destinations for VFR travel. In addition, the study provides insight into the critical importance of VFR travel in terms of its significance for large parts of the economically marginalised spaces of the country.