Unpacking the spatial patterns of visiting friends and relatives (VFR) mobilities within (and between) countries represents an investigatory void in existing international VFR scholarship. The paper seeks to interrogate the relationships between historical and contemporary migration flows and VFR travel by using the case of South Africa. The study highlights the importance of understanding the role of multi‐locational households, the roots and persistence of circulatory migration flows and their manifestations in the present‐day geography of VFR travel mobilities in post‐apartheid South Africa. Interpreting the changing spatial patterns of VFR travel must be grounded in the historical and contemporary dynamics of local and regional migration systems. For South Africa's poorest areas where VFR travel flows are the dominant if sometimes the only form of tourism, policy issues arise for leveraging this form of tourism for enhancing local development. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.