From bustling casino complexes and beachfront hotels to tucked‑away guest houses and Airbnbs, the tourism sector is a vital part of our economy, contributing almost 9% to our GDP in 2025. Unfortunately it has also become a prime target for opportunistic and organised crime.
The Southern African tourism sector (including South Africa and Namibia), faces an ongoing challenge in shifting perceptions of the region as a potential crime risk – and it’s not hard to see why. Tourists arrive with cash and valuables and busy public spaces create the ideal cover for criminals who strike quickly and disappear into traffic.
Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology offers a powerful, practical way to change this – not only by helping to solve incidents after they occur, but increasingly by preventing them in the first place.
Everyday risks in tourism – and why vehicles matter
The threats facing tourism and hospitality businesses range from petty theft to violent crime:
- Handbags and backpacks grabbed from tourists leaving curio shops or restaurants, with suspects fleeing in vehicles within seconds.
- Robberies and even serious violent crimes at short‑term rental properties such as Airbnbs and guest houses.
- Vehicles used in crimes being dumped in busy casino or hotel parking areas to cool off and evade tracking.
- Even rental cars are sometimes used in criminal activity, with little consequence for the real drivers.
What these incidents have in common is that they almost always involve a vehicle – and that’s where ANPR can be transformative.
Turning cameras into crime‑fighting infrastructure
Deployed correctly, ANPR technology creates a live, searchable network of vehicle movements in the smallest towns and across the country. In places that depend heavily on tourism, this can be the difference between a dead end and a viable lead.
The NAVIC team has experienced many instances where a tourist reports a theft and can only remember part of a number plate – or even just “a red Golf”. ANPR allows operators to:
- Search cameras near the incident location within the relevant time window
- Identify vehicles matching the partial plate or vehicle type.
- Narrow this down to a likely registration and pass that on to law enforcement.
Even where there is no plate, ANPR‑enabled systems combined with camera networks and basic descriptors (colour, make, time) significantly reduce the investigative haystack. For tourism hubs, this helps protect visitors while also giving local businesses confidence that there is a system in place to respond when things go wrong.
Casinos as a model of collaboration
Casinos face a unique set of risks, particularly around their parking areas. Stolen or “hot” vehicles are often left in these large, high‑turnover spaces to cool off or evade trackers. In response, many casinos have moved beyond simply adding more guards and cameras – they are using ANPR as part of a shared, collaborative security model.
Key elements of this approach include:
- Private ANPR levels where casinos can flag vehicles and individuals of interest, including troublesome patrons or suspected criminal actors.
- Blacklists shared across a casino association, so that a problem vehicle or person barred from one property can trigger alerts at others.
- The ability to open selected data to trusted partners, creating early warnings when known vehicles of concern enter any participating site.
This shows what’s possible when an industry recognises that crime doesn’t respect property lines and responds by treating vehicle intelligence as a shared asset.
Extending this ecosystem to hotels, Airbnbs and rental cars
The same principles can and should be applied across the broader travel and leisure ecosystem:
- Hotels and resorts can maintain VIP and vehicle‑of‑interest lists to better manage risk on their properties, while contributing anonymised data into a wider tourism network.
- Guest houses and Airbnbs – especially given the growth and associated spike in incidents – could participate via municipal or regional ANPR initiatives, receiving alerts when vehicles linked to previous incidents return to their areas.
- Rental car companies could use ANPR to track vehicles of concern more intelligently, from spotting suspicious patterns of movement, to helping identify who is actually driving a vehicle at the time of an incident.
A call for a tourism‑wide vehicle intelligence network
NAVIC sees the real opportunity in better sector coordination. Imagine a model where:
- Tourism boards (national or provincial bodies) champion an ANPR‑driven safety initiative.
- Airbnbs, guest houses, hotels, casinos, and car rental companies feed into shared watchlists of vehicles and patterns of concern.
- Participating organisations can receive alerts and insights relevant to their risk profiles, while still respecting privacy and legal frameworks.
In a network such as this, an incident at one Airbnb could prompt proactive checks at nearby guest houses. A vehicle flagged at a casino could trigger alerts if it appears in hotel districts, and tourists themselves would benefit from a quieter, largely invisible layer of protection.
For NAVIC and its partners, ANPR is not just about cameras and plates – it’s giving the tourism sector the means to collaborate around a common goal of making our destinations safer, more welcoming, and more resilient in the face of evolving criminal tactics.
Contact NAVIC to find out how we can help your organisation be part of building a safer, economically resilient South Africa.