CAPE TOWN, May 4 (Xinhua) -- South African president Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday urged African countries to streamline tourist visa regimes to attract more tourists.

African countries must reduce the onerous and often unnecessary bureaucratic red tape that tourists who want to visit African countries face, Ramaphosa said at Africa's Travel Indaba 2019, the continent's largest travel trade show, in Durban, a coastal city in eastern South Africa.

"We are committed to working towards the African Union's goal of visa free travel and a single African air transport market," he said.

The South African government is in the process of radically overhauling its visa dispensation for the rest of the world and introducing a world class e-visa system, Ramaphosa said.

He said tourism plays an important role in his government's strategy to raise over 100 billion U.S. dollars in new investment over five years.

As part of efforts to revitalize the economy, South Africa is focusing its energies on labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture, the oceans economy and tourism, Ramaphosa said.

"We are... acutely aware that we face competition from other tourism destinations around the globe," he said.

It is an age where the end-to-end travel experience has been optimized through technology, where decisions on where to go and where to stay, and where not to go and where not to stay, are made on the basis of peer review, Ramaphosa said.

"We have to marshal all the means at our disposal to show that we have what it takes to be that destination and to offer that experience that tourists want," he said.

The three-day Africa Travel Indaba, which started on Thursday, brought together hundreds of representatives from around Africa and other countries to explore ways of developing tourism in Africa.

The event also offered a platform to showcase tourism products from across the continent. Enditem

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