North-South time release study: destination and travel value for regional operators

February 7, 2025

The same border posts that process a shipping container also process a tourist's passport, a tour operator's vehicle, and the fresh produce a lodge kitchen restocks weekly from across a border. That overlap is easy to miss in a report framed around customs clearance, but it is the reason the Report of the Time Release Study (TRS), launched by SADC's Secretariat on 7 February 2025 in Harare, is worth a second look from the region's tourism and hospitality operators, not only its freight forwarders.

The corridor studied — Durban's port through Beitbridge into Zimbabwe, on to Chirundu into Zambia, and further to Kasumbalesa at the DRC border — runs directly past or near some of the region's most significant tourism geography, including the Victoria Falls area that straddles the Zimbabwe-Zambia frontier at Chirundu's broader corridor and the wider conservation landscapes of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. A study measuring how efficiently goods and, by extension, the infrastructure supporting cross-border movement functions has a plausible bearing on how efficiently people move as well.

Border posts as shared infrastructure for freight and mobility

Border posts along the North-South Corridor process commercial freight and cross-border travellers using overlapping, and sometimes identical, physical infrastructure and staff capacity. A border post congested with commercial trucks queuing for customs clearance is frequently also a slower, more congested crossing for tour operators moving vehicles and travellers across the same frontier, particularly at posts like Chirundu that were specifically redesigned as joint facilities to handle both freight and passenger traffic more efficiently.

SADC's description of the study's aims is framed entirely around goods clearance rather than passenger movement, and the TRS's methodology, drawn from the World Customs Organisation, is specifically designed to measure cargo release rather than tourist processing times. That means any read-across to tourism mobility is inferential rather than confirmed by this study's scope [TK] — a distinction operators should keep in mind before assuming faster freight clearance automatically means faster passport control.

What a more efficient corridor could mean for regional travel packaging

Regional tour operators increasingly package multi-country itineraries — a Victoria Falls stay combined with a Zambian safari leg, or a South African wildlife circuit extended into Zimbabwe — and the commercial viability of such itineraries depends partly on predictable, efficient border crossings for vehicles, guides and travellers moving between them. Where cross-border commercial infrastructure improves, whether through better staffing, digital systems or facility upgrades prompted by trade facilitation work, the same investment can incidentally benefit passenger-side processing at a shared facility, even where it was not the primary objective.

Tour operators building itineraries that cross any of the four border posts studied — Beitbridge, Chirundu or Kasumbalesa in particular — have a commercial interest in tracking whether any infrastructure or staffing recommendations arising from the TRS extend to the passenger-processing side of these facilities, since that would be the more direct signal for their own operations.

The conservation and hospitality supply chain angle

Lodges, hotels and hospitality operators along and near this corridor frequently import specialised goods — food and beverage stock, hospitality equipment, vehicle parts — across the same borders this study measured, and unpredictable clearance delays for these categories translate into the same kind of operational cost and menu or service limitation that any cross-border retailer faces. A hospitality operator near Victoria Falls sourcing supplies through the Chirundu corridor, for instance, experiences the practical effect of that border post's clearance performance directly in supply reliability, independent of any tourism-specific policy discussion.

That supply-chain dependency is a reminder that the region's tourism economy, often discussed in terms of visitor numbers and marketing, rests on the same cross-border logistics infrastructure this trade study assessed.

Mobility as the underappreciated regional integration story

SADC's broader integration agenda includes protocols on the facilitation of movement of persons, running in parallel to — though administratively distinct from — the trade facilitation work this TRS falls under. Progress on one does not automatically transfer to the other, but a region succeeding in demonstrating measurable improvement in goods clearance builds an evidentiary and institutional case for applying similar rigour to passenger and tourism mobility measurement, an area where comparably robust regional data is less commonly published [TK].

Tourism sector advocates within SADC member states have a reasonable basis to point to the TRS as a methodological precedent worth replicating for passenger and tourism-vehicle border processing specifically.

What comes next

The test for the region's tourism and hospitality operators is whether any implementation following the TRS's trade-focused recommendations produces visible spillover benefits at shared border facilities, or whether freight and passenger processing remain effectively separate workstreams even at joint posts like Chirundu. Neither outcome was confirmed at the time of this launch.

For destination operators along the corridor, the practical next step is to monitor whether SADC or individual member states commission any parallel measurement of passenger-side border efficiency, since that would be the more direct evidence base for whether this corridor's efficiency gains extend to the region's travel economy as well as its trade economy.