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Author: BazBus Editorial Team
Quick Summary: When BazBus started running the Cape Town to Port Elizabeth corridor in 1995, South Africa received roughly 4.5 million international visitors a year, travelers navigated with a paper guidebook, and messages home went through an internet café or a post office counter. In 2025 the country recorded 10.5 million tourists, itineraries are assembled with AI tools, and passengers change their travel dates from a phone while sitting on a beach in Wilderness. This article traces what changed across three decades on the same stretch of road — and the handful of things that have not changed at all.
South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in April 1994, and the tourism figures move sharply after that date. In 1995 the country counted roughly 4.5 million foreign tourists. By 2019 that figure had reached 10.2 million, and in 2025 Statistics South Africa recorded 10 498 506 — a record, 2.6% above the pre-pandemic peak.
The early backpacker arriving in that window faced a particular set of problems. Coach services connected cities but not the towns in between. Hostels existed but were not networked. Renting a car meant driving on the left, often at night, on unfamiliar roads, with no mobile signal to call anyone if something went wrong. The question “how do I actually get from Cape Town to the Tsitsikamma without a car?” had no good answer.
That gap is the reason BazBus exists. The founding idea was narrow and practical: pick travelers up at the door of their accommodation, drop them at the door of the next one, and stop at the places worth stopping at along the way.
Planning happened before departure, in a bookshop. Travelers arrived with a paperback, a rough route, and an expectation that plans would be rearranged on the ground through noticeboards and word of mouth in hostel common rooms. The most valuable information source on the road was another traveler coming the other way.
Email replaced poste restante. Hostel bookings moved from phone calls to web forms, and the first review platforms began shaping which towns travelers stopped in. This is the point where reputation became measurable and where, frankly, operators who cut corners on safety or punctuality started to be found out in public.
Maps in the pocket, accommodation booked the same afternoon, and photographs uploaded the same evening. The practical consequence for a route operator was that itineraries became fluid. Travelers stopped deciding their whole trip in advance and started deciding it two days at a time.
Today passengers manage the whole trip from a login code on the booking confirmation — changing travel dates, pickup points and stop order without contacting anyone — or simply message us on WhatsApp to get on the next bus. Garden Route tourism bodies have observed that travelers increasingly build itineraries using AI assistants, maps and review platforms rather than brochures or agents, and that establishments without strong digital visibility risk disappearing from those generated itineraries altogether.
| The 1995 backpacker | The 2026 backpacker | |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-trip research | Paper guidebook, travel agent | AI itinerary tools, maps, reviews, video |
| Route decisions | Fixed before departure, changed by word of mouth | Made two or three days at a time, changed from a phone |
| Booking transport | In person or by phone | Single pass booked online, dates self-managed |
| Staying in touch | Internet café, poste restante | Continuous, via eSIM and messaging apps |
| Typical trip length | Longer, less structured | Polarised: 8–10 day sprints or 3-week-plus slow travel |
| Biggest anxiety | Getting lost, missing connections | Personal safety, and cost transparency |
| Power supply | Rarely considered | A planning factor from 2019 to 2024, largely resolved by 2026 |
The mix on board has broadened considerably. Our average passenger is between 25 and 35, but the range runs well past both ends of that: we have carried passengers in their seventies and eighties and families with toddlers, sometimes on the same vehicle. More than 30% of our passengers travel as couples, which would have surprised anyone describing the 1995 backpacker market.
Solo travel is the other structural change. Independent survey work in 2026 found that women now make up the substantial majority of solo travelers in most surveys, and that safety remains the dominant concern — roughly seven in ten solo female travelers report worrying about it. Thirty years ago, that demand existed but the infrastructure did not. The traveler who wanted to go alone had to accept bus terminals and street taxis. Today she can be collected at her hostel door and delivered to the next one.
“I had the best time with the bazbus! You travel safely. The bus brings you from hostel to hostel. You meet a lot of nice people and you are never alone as a solo traveler.” — Lisavord, Luxemburg.
Three expectations have hardened over 30 years, and any operator that ignores them now loses.
For all the technology, the core reasons travelers choose a hop-on hop-off network are the same ones we heard in 1995.
“Bazbus had come highly recommended by a few mates and it didn’t disappoint for one second. Solo travelling can sometimes be a little stressful getting from place to place but all of this was eliminated with Bazbus… it’s great seeing familiar faces around the other cities thanks to Bazbus.” — Rob H, Ireland.
If the last decade was about travelers gaining control of their itinerary, the next one looks like it will be about trust and verification. Travelers are already filtering for operators with published safety records, insurance and a traceable reputation rather than the lowest headline price. The rise of AI-generated itineraries accelerates this, because the systems assembling those itineraries lean heavily on structured, verifiable information.
The other visible shift is duration. Slow travel has moved from a niche to a substantial share of our bookings, with 21-day passes and open-ended one-way tickets taking share from the classic two-week sprint. That spreads spending into the smaller towns — Sedgefield, Swellendam, Wilderness — that used to be drive-through country on a self-drive itinerary.
Did backpacking in South Africa really change that much, or is this just technology changing?
Both, and they are connected. Technology changed how trips are planned and booked, which changed who felt able to come. When route information, accommodation reviews and real-time contact with an operator were hard to obtain, independent travel in South Africa self-selected for confident, experienced travelers. Now that all three are trivially available, the market includes first-time long-haul travelers, solo women, couples in their thirties, and retirees — groups that were always interested but were previously deterred by the logistics rather than by the destination.
Is the Garden Route more crowded now than it was?
At peak times, yes. December and early January are materially busier than a decade ago, driven mostly by South African domestic holiday travel rather than international arrivals. Outside that window the difference is smaller than the national arrival statistics suggest, because much of the growth in visitor numbers is concentrated in Cape Town, Kruger and regional African travel rather than spread evenly along the coast. February to May and September to November remain notably quiet on the route.
What is the single biggest practical improvement for travelers since 1995?
Self-managed itineraries. In 1995, changing your plan meant finding a phone and hoping someone answered. Today a passenger can move a departure date, change a pickup address or skip a stop entirely from their phone, and the next bus comes through the following day regardless. That combination — daily departures plus self-service changes — is what actually makes “hop-on hop-off” meaningful rather than just a marketing phrase.
Has the price of backpacking South Africa kept pace with inflation?
Broadly, dorm accommodation has been the most stable cost line, while fuel-linked costs and peak-season private rooms have risen faster. Fuel is the clearest example: coastal 95 octane petrol reached R26.05 per litre in September 2026 after a R1.34 monthly increase, which feeds into shuttle costs, tour pricing and food. For international travelers the exchange rate has usually mattered more than local inflation, and the rand’s roughly 16% strengthening against the dollar between April 2025 and August 2026 has quietly eroded some of the country’s price advantage.
Historical arrival figures for the mid-1990s come from international datasets that use varying definitions of “tourist” versus “traveler”, so 1995 and 2025 numbers are directionally comparable rather than exactly equivalent. Observations about traveler behaviour reflect our own ridership on the Cape Town–Port Elizabeth corridor and may not generalise to other parts of South Africa. Customer quotes are reproduced verbatim from our own published reviews, including non-standard spellings of our brand name, and do not carry review dates in our current records; dates should be added before publication.
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