Rising crimes against foreign visitors and the rollout of new entry visas caused international tourist arrivals to Namibia to drop by 3.2% in 2025, Environment, Forestry and Tourism Minister Indileni Daniel revealed Thursday.
Addressing an industry briefing at the launch of the latest Tourist Statistical Report, Daniel confirmed that the country recorded 1,217,108 tourist arrivals in 2025, falling from the 1,257,093 arrivals tracked during the previous year.
“While this marginal decrease may be viewed as statistically minor, we must treat it as a wake-up call and a clear signal to all of us to renew our focus and improve our competitiveness as a country to ensure that our value proposition continues to resonate with international travelers,” she said.
In this regard, she said there is a need to invigorate demand in key and emerging source markets, enhance the overall visitor experience to encourage repeat travel, strengthen destination marketing with targeted data-driven campaigns, invest in product development, and diversification of sustainable tourism products such as cruise and astro tourism to protect our natural and cultural assets
According to Daniel, this decline is experienced in most of the key source markets such as Germany, South Africa, and France, just to mention a few, and can be traced to specific factors that transpired during the year under review.
“The safety concerns that made headlines in international and local print and social media, that is, incidents of crimes committed against our tourists. This is an issue of major concern that we simply cannot and should not tolerate,” she said
Furthermore, she recognized the implementation of the reviewed visa requirements by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Immigration, Safety and Security, which had teething problems, and this might have also contributed to this fall.
“Despite this, the new visa requirements were necessary,” she said
Daniel, meanwhile, said the task now is to find solutions to restore confidence in the Namibian brand. To address challenges affecting the industry, such as the Safety and Security of our tourists, the Ministry developed the National Spatial Tourism Masterplan.
“One of the strategic recommendations of the masterplan is to strengthen institutional capacity and collaboration through the establishment of a permanent inter-institutional working group for tourism safety and security and crisis management,” she noted.
On a positive note, she announced that, for the first time, the report features statistics on visitor arrivals to the country’s national parks.
A snippet of figures in the report notes that Namibia received a total number of 1,345,168 international visitor arrivals in 2025, of which 90.5% were tourists, 8.5% were same-day visitors, 0.7% were returning residents, and 0.3% was made up of other international visitor arrivals categories.
The international visitor arrivals figure for 2025 experienced about 6.9% decline from 1,444,174 international visitor arrivals received in 2024. In addition, international tourist arrivals also declined with 3.2% from 1,257,093 in 2024 to 1,217,108.
The top ten source markets for 2025 were South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France.
