South Africa recorded its highest ever tourism month in December, a new Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) report shows, with a total of 937 792 overnight travellers, or tourists, of which 263 771 were from overseas and 668 045 from the rest of the continent.

For 2013 as a whole, more than 9.5-million tourists were recorded, representing a 3.7% increase on the 9.2-million tourists recorded in 2012. However for seasonal reasons, December attracts more tourists than any other month.

The December figure, which is contained in StatsSA’s latest ‘Tourism and Migration’ report, represented a year-on-year rise of 7.6% from the 871 774 tourists recorded in December 2012. The figures were compiled using information on legal movements collected by the Department of Home Affairs.

Overnight tourists formed part of the 4.3-million travellers that either arrived at or left South African ports of entry in December. Of those, about 1.2-million were South African residents and 3.1-million were foreign travellers.

The volume of arrivals for foreign travellers increased by 15.4% year on year to 1.5-million, while the volume of foreign-traveller departures increased by 19.4% to 1.52-million when compared with the same month in 2012. There were 532 634 same-day visitors during the month.

StatsSA reported that more than two-thirds of all tourists came from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, while 28% were from overseas and 2% from other countries in Africa.

The main SADC contributors to the number of December tourists were Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Mozambique, who collectively contributed nearly two-thirds of all SADC tourists.

Overseas tourists were mainly from the UK, the US and Germany while tourists from other African countries were largely from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda.

With 46 538 tourists, the UK remained the largest overseas contributor to the tourism number in December, but was also the only country in the top ten to show a year-on-year decline in tourist numbers. UK tourist numbers decreased by 3.8%, from 48 398 in December 2012 to 46 538 in December 2013.

A comparison between movements in December 2012 and December 2013 showed that the number of tourists increased in the nine other countries, which included China, France, Brazil, the US, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and India. China had the highest increase of 24.1%, from 9 852 tourists in December 2012 to 12 228 in December last year.