Passport stamps used to be the traveller’s badge of honour. The more stamps you could show, the more adventures you’d had in the big, wide (and mostly analogue) world. Today’s tourist doesn’t have that. Physical stamps are on their way out as regions such as Europe roll out digitised systems, biometric scans and electronic gates.

South Africa recently took steps in that direction, introducing a new Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system before November’s G20 Summit in Johannesburg. ‘It is a system that allows online applications, biometric capture and instant approvals, aimed at replacing paper-based systems and visa applications,’ says Imraan Mahomed, director of employment law at Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr. ‘The ETA will be integrated with the Electronic Movement Control System that will be based on facial recognition at ports of entry, with piloting taking place at OR Tambo and Cape Town International Airports. The ETA is further aimed at ensuring quick, automated arrivals and improved national security.’

The mobile-enabled platform, which uses facial recognition and QR-coded documentation, supersedes the existing e-Visa platform for short-term tourist visas of up to 90 days and is intended to remove the long-standing visa bottlenecks that have constrained South Africa’s post-pandemic tourism growth.

Speaking at the Tourism Business Council of South Africa’s Leadership Conference in September, Leon Schreiber, Minister of Home Affairs, said the ETA is set to eliminate ‘visa barriers that have suppressed South Africa’s tourism potential for many years, while simultaneously revolutionising the security of our immigration processes. Our Trusted Tour Operator Scheme pilot has already brought in more than 35 000 additional tourists from China and India in just seven months, and the ETA has the potential to turbocharge these numbers in 2026’.

At its soft launch in November, the ETA system was made available to four G20 member countries whose citizens require visas to visit South Africa – China and India, as well as Indonesia and Mexico. ‘The ETA is going to turbocharge tourism at a scale that we have not seen in decades,’ said Schreiber. ‘Our next bottleneck is going to be that we don’t have enough flights from some of these countries.’

Mexico’s inclusion on that shortlist is a quiet reminder that travel extends beyond tourism, and into trade too. In 2025, news broke that South Africa had lost out on a ZAR400 million Netflix film production because of visa delays.

The Department of Home Affairs plans to expand the ETA to South Africa’s land borders, aiming to eliminate corruption and increase border security. ‘It’s very simple,’ said Schreiber. ‘If you arrive at Bulembu Bridge, Lebombo or any of our land borders, and your face does not match the biometrics that were uploaded for the ETA, the automatic gate will not open – and you cannot bribe your way through a computer.’

South Africa’s ETA follows a similar rollout in Kenya in 2024. There, the thinking was that when people move, money moves. By introducing an ETA system, the Kenyan government believed it was, in the spirit of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), eliminating a non-tariff barrier to trade. However, many saw the ETA system as simply a visa by another name.

‘For many travellers, the implementation problems quickly translated into frustrating real-world consequences,’ writes Margaret Monyani, senior migration researcher at the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria, in a recent online blog. ‘Citizens from many African countries that had reciprocal visa waiver agreements with Kenya, such as South Africa and Angola, suddenly needed to apply for an online travel permit.’

That added layer of bureaucracy contradicted the essence of visa-free travel and was perceived as a step backwards. By January 2025, Kenya had reversed its policy, making all African nationals (except those from Somalia and Libya, on security grounds) exempt from the ETA requirement.

‘Perhaps Kenya had a false start on its sprint towards visa openness, but [it] is slowly finding its footing,’ Monyani writes. ‘The ETA policy is now using technology to achieve efficiency without alienating the travellers Kenya aims to welcome.’

Where East Africa has seen success is with its one-stop border posts, which reportedly cut border-crossing times by 70% and save the region more than US$63 million in logistics costs each year.

Kiprono Kittony, chairman of the Nairobi Securities Exchange, shared his thoughts in a recent Standard Bank vodcast. ‘One of the greatest sticking points in the co-operation between [East African] nations has been the movement of goods at the border points,’ he said. ‘This was resolved by a very simple treaty that was engaged in by the countries of the East African region to have a one-stop border post. Today, if I’m going to cross into Tanzania, for argument’s sake, at the Port of Namanga, I don’t need to go through two different buildings. The customs officials are in one facility, as are the immigration officials.’

In South Africa, Schreiber has made it clear that the ETA system aims to – as he’s so fond of putting it – ‘turbocharge’ tourism. The country’s international tourism sector is still 12.8% below 2019 levels, highlighting a slow post-Covid recovery. Statistics South Africa recorded 8.9 million tourists arriving in 2024 (the most recent full year for which numbers are available), up 5.1% from 2023 but still short of the 10.2 million recorded before the pandemic disrupted global travel.

A trip up the African coast would bring good goods. While any honest statistician will concede that there’s a world of difference between correlation and causality, there is an undeniable link between East Africa’s e-visa reforms and the East African Community’s recent tourism boom.

The 2024 EAC Tourism Barometer reports tourism receipts in East Africa hitting US$7.7 billion in 2023, a 30.9% increase from 2022. Kenya and Tanzania had the most substantial recoveries, exceeding pre-pandemic levels by 53% and 30% respectively, while international arrivals across the region reached 12 million in 2023, fully back to pre-Covid levels.

These improvements came off the same baggage-claim carousel as the implementation of the EAC’s one-stop border posts, Kenya’s ETA roll-out and Rwanda’s introduction of visa-free entry for all African nationals (a policy also introduced in Ghana and, more recently, Kenya).

‘South Africa has the potential to achieve similar growth,’ David Frost, CEO of the South African Tourism Association, told Business Day Empowerment. ‘But it requires addressing the structural blockages in our visa system, improving vehicle licensing processes, developing language skills in the industry and implementing targeted marketing strategies for key source markets. With proper consultation and collaboration, there’s no reason we cannot match or exceed the recovery rates seen elsewhere in Africa.’

Easier visas are a significant step in that direction. And at a time when some countries are moving to close their borders, Africa is taking tentative steps towards open borders, enabled by digital technologies that make international travel quicker, easier and more secure.

On the journey to improved tourism numbers, smoother trade and greater cross-border co-operation, the loss of passport stamps seems a small price to pay.

By Mark van Dijk
Images: iStock