With most of us back at work by now, the December holidays are all but a distant memory – except for the leftover Christmas cake still haunting us from its tinfoil packaging in the fridge. But, as is tradition for January, local tourism authorities are tooting their horns once more about Cape Town’s festive season visitor numbers. To be fair though, I don’t blame them.

The Table Mountain Cableway claims to have had a 32% increase in visitors in December 2015 compared to the same period in 2014. The Cableway’s marketing manager, Collette van Aswegen, says the glorious sunshine and complete lack of wind over the December holiday period (thanks, El Niño) brought 149,000 people to our famous rock, with the Cableway itself being operational 92% of the time – a new record.

shop at the top

Van Aswegen also says in a statement that ‘retail is king’, with the Shop at the Top (of the mountain) enjoying the sale of more than 68,000 items over the course of the month, including 2,857 t-shirts and 1,422 jackets.

Around 6.5 tons of food and drink was also brought up to the Table Mountain Café, with more than 5,000 litres of soft drinks and beers sold (that’s around one soft drink or beer per visitor for those keeping score), and around 8,700 soft-serve ice creams.

table mountain cableway

So, congrats to the Table Mountain Cableway. It’s always a good thing to see Cape Town’s most famous attraction perform so well, and we expect the overall holiday figures to be a bit higher once the January numbers are included

Don’t forget as well that the Cableway Summer Sunset Special is on again until 26 February, meaning you can score a ticket to the top for half price after 6 pm.

Photography courtesy Table Mountain Cableway on Instagram

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