So just how many visitors have we had in SA?

South Africa’s department of home affairs says more than 1 million visitors entered the country between June 1 and July 1 2010 and during last night’s semi-final the commentator said that the World Cup had attracted over 500,000 tourists to South Africa. All rather confusing.

The department of home affairs says its Movement Control System recorded 1,020,321 tourists in the month coinciding with the World Cup, up 25 percent from 819,495 on the same period in 2009. The highest number of visitors were from neighbouring southern African countries followed by Britain, the United States, Germany, Australia, Brazil and Mexico. Apparently forty-three “undesirables” were prohibited from boarding airlines to South Africa, with 188 people denied entry on arrival.

A headline in the Cape Times today suggests ‘SA welcomes over 1 Million Visitors’, which is patently true, but don’t those stats suggest that we’ve only had 200,000 more visitors than we would have had anyway?

The Times on Monday quoted home office spokesman Rich Mkhondo as saying “We are confident that we will surpass the number of 450,00 that we initially predicted”, but that “World Cup visitors only account for around 20 percent of the home affairs’ figures. More international guests are expected in the last stretch of the tournament.”

This raises the question as to how exactly the home office is able to measure who is here for the World Cup and who isn’t. This measurement is fraught with difficulty. Even if you’re here for business, it’s pretty hard to ignore the World Cup and how easy is it to ascertain from every visitor why exactly they are here?

We’ll probably have to wait until after Sunday’s final for the definitive statistics although it seems to me that these stats can be contorted in any number of ways. All we really need to know is that we’ve had over a million visitors for a mid-winter month and that the first African World Cup has been an unmitigated success and a fantastic advert for South Africa which should ensure a steady stream of tourists to our shores for a long time to come!