The Asia Pacific region is the largest and fastest-growing outbound travel market in the world, 650 million to 700 million international trips annually, growing towards 800 million by 2027. China alone recorded 167 million outbound trips in 2025. India’s outbound travel is projected to reach China-like scale by 2040. This is a half-trillion-dollar market. The Western Cape currently captures a fraction of it.
That is precisely why Wesgro was in the room at the PATA Annual Summit 2026 in Gyeongju and Pohang, South Korea, and why the summit’s theme, “Navigating towards a resilient future”, is not an abstract aspiration for us. It is a strategic priority.
What the summit confirmed
This summit confirmed a key insight, namely, that destinations that will lead the next decade are not those that grew the fastest, they are those that grew the most intentionally. Tourism competitiveness goes beyond marketing. It is about growing in a resilient way.
The summit’s conversations pushed beyond marketing into the harder questions of destination competitiveness, resilience and sustainable growth.
Three realities stood out with particular force:
- Data is a strategic asset not a support function. Understanding traveller intent, booking behaviour, dispersal patterns and conversion metrics is becoming central to smarter tourism growth. The sector is moving from soft metrics toward measurable economic impact.
- Digital trust is the new currency. As AI reshapes how travellers discover and plan, destination organisations that invest in credible, data-led storytelling and seamless digital user journeys will remain the trusted voice in a noisy information environment. Our platforms matter more not less.
- Community inclusion is competitive advantage. Tourism growth that meaningfully includes local communities, protects local identity and distributes economic benefit builds resilient, differentiated destinations over the long term.
The Western Cape’s strategic response
The Western Cape is performing strongly: record arrivals, improving connectivity and a focus on diversifying its market portfolio. We are also acutely aware of what strong performance can obscure.
Growth and fragility can rise together. Our work is to make sure one does not outpace the other.
What PATA confirmed is that the next phase of work must focus on three priorities:
- Reshaping demand: Actively diversifying our markets and targeting new traveller segments beyond our traditional base. A half-trillion dollar Asia-Pacific outbound market is growing at pace with travellers who are actively increasing their spend. We need to be structurally connected to it not on the margins of it.
- Transforming supply: Mobility management and deliberately expanding the physical capacity of destinations beyond Cape Town’s urban core. The Garden Route, Overberg, West Coast, Cape Winelands and Karoo carry genuine product. The work is to build the discovery infrastructure and booking pathways that turn that product into economic participation.
- Building enabling capability: Advocacy for regulatory reform (visas and bilateral air service agreements), improved coordination across the tiers of government, data and technology investment and the genuine inclusion of community-based businesses in the mainstream tourism economy. Tourism supports over 300 000 jobs in the Western Cape. Value growth, not just volume growth, creates better jobs and more of them per tourist dollar. That requires trade, transport, home affairs and tourism policy moving together not sequentially.
These three priorities will shape Wesgro’s market development and destination strategy in the period ahead.
Wesgro has already initiated a structured stakeholder engagement process, enriched by research, to consider how the Western Cape tourism industry moves beyond marketing toward genuine resilience. That work is underway and PATA 2026 has sharpened its urgency and its direction.
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