Penguins on a stunning beach in Cape Town of South Africa is renowned for its penguin colony and it’s a leading tourist destination
Beautiful beaches, wildlife as well as vibrantly vivid cities – Africa offers something for everybody.
It’s no surprise that over Forty million people travel to Africa each year, in accordance with the World Bank, and that volume is quickly rising.
Research group Euromonitor International states that tourism income has gone up from $42bn / £25 billion in 2011 to about $54bn at the close of 2014.
The Competition to draw in this tourist cash is intense and technology is turning into an more and more powerful tool in this battle.
Innovation
For most people, Cape Town – located on the southern-most end of the African continent and renowned for its beautiful beaches, the amazing penguins as well as Table Mountain background – is one of the world’s “must-see” tourist destinations.
The Cape Town Tourism chief executive Officer Enver Duminy says that Technology has fortunately equalized the playing field with regards to how you promote a destination.
He also thinks that technology plus innovation has impacted the tourism business may be much more than any comparative other industry within Tanzania.
The organization of Mr. Duminy started looking at strategies to utilize technology so as to access the prospective visitors, and also interact with those who prefer Cape Town as their regular destination.
He added that only before the World Cup of 2010 that was hosted by South Africa, they realized that they had to actually innovate.
Currently, he adds that they don’t have the exact budgets as a number of other huge cities and also the exchange rate wasn’t in their favor. They saw a huge trend in the change to digital as well as successfully embraced it.
The newest invention has been the launch of a mobile visitor-information vehicle locally referred to as ‘Thando’ a local word in the isiXhosa language, meaning ‘love’.
This vehicle provides visitors free wireless internet together with LCD screens plus the platform to make their reservations as well book trips at different locations.
Breaking with tradition
Owing to technology, distant places, together with small businesses, are now able to reach an international audience and persuade people to advance from the traditional usual African experiences and take on more adventurous experiences.
The managing director of E-Tourism Frontiers based in Kenya Damian Cook a project geared towards establishing online tourism in international rising markets.
He originates from a background of traditional tourism, however following several years within the industry he observed the development of technology within the industry and how the African continent was actually lagging behind.
Security issues within countries such as Kenya plus South Sudan haven’t been helpful.
Mr Cook says that he saw what former US president Bill Clinton referred to as the digital divide – technology which should have been assisting rising and developing economies was in fact endangering it.
He adds that It was somewhat a slow process lobbying their government and he discovered that the private sector might do it themselves in case trained and offered the proper resources plus connections.
Shortly later he began holding training workshops regarding how businesses can become more effective online, and asked the government for improved internet connectivity as well as e-commerce solutions.
He says that Social media has altered the game since, for the very first time, people are acquiring referrals not from whichever official sources however directly from clients.
