World Tourism Day: Chinese carmaker Jetour goes all-in on travel - IOL
As World Tourism Day arrives on September 27, Jetour is leaning on its global “Travel With Jetour” campaign to push the travel and lifestyle side of its business locally.
As World Tourism Day arrives on September 27, automaker Jetour is using its global "Travel With Jetour" campaign to promote the travel and lifestyle side of its business in South Africa. The campaign forms part of a wider push by the brand to position itself in the local market roughly two years after entering it.
Jetour registered its South African subsidiary in January 2024 and launched locally later that year, introducing the right-hand-drive Dashing and X70 Plus models at a Johannesburg event in September 2024. Additional models have followed since.
The brand picked up its highest-profile local recognition in May 2026, when the Jetour T2 won the overall title at the South African Car of the Year awards, also taking the Mild Adventure category — the first time a Chinese-owned brand has won the overall title in the award's 40-year history.
Jetour says the T2 has sold more than 4,000 units locally since launch, out of a reported 570,000 units sold worldwide, and that the model was selected as an official vehicle for the G20 Summit hosted in South Africa. The company also says it held the top-selling spot in the local boxy SUV segment by the second quarter of 2026, and that its dealer network received the 2025 Gold Award in the National Automobile Dealers' Association's Dealer Satisfaction Index — figures that have not been independently verified.
Beyond the vehicles, Jetour frames its local strategy around three areas: its product line-up, a services and partnerships "ecosystem," and marketing tied to culture and lifestyle. In practice, this has included a local owners' club, a fan music festival held in May 2025, and vehicle positioning built around outdoor and adventure use.
Globally, the company says it operates through more than 2,000 sales and service points across over 100 markets, and describes having built relationships with more than 2.5 million customers it calls "travellers." This kind of brand-building through community and experience, rather than price and specifications alone, is an approach several other automakers — particularly Chinese brands entering the South African market in recent years — have also adopted.
Jetour has additionally backed conservation-linked content, including "Return of the Cheetah," a documentary filmed in Namibia produced with Discovery, which won a Gold Telly Award in 2025. A second season released this year added a further Gold Telly, two Silver Tellys, and a Gold Tower at the New York Festivals Advertising Awards.
The company has funded similar projects tied to the Sindh ibex in Pakistan, the Tibetan antelope in China, and turtles in Malaysia. These initiatives fall under Jetour's marketing spend rather than its core vehicle business, and form part of how the brand is attempting to differentiate itself from competitors offering similar specifications at similar price points.
Whether this broader "ecosystem" strategy — the owners' club, festivals, and documentaries — translates into measurable sales, or functions mainly as marketing layered on top of competitive pricing and rapid model expansion, remains to be seen as Jetour's presence in the market matures.
