SA organisations strive to bring tourism online

Two South African tourism organisations – South Africa Tourism and Southern Africa Direct – are collaborating to provide the local tourism industry with assistance in promoting services internationally, using the marketing opportunities offered by online video and social networking.

The partnership will be launched at this year’s Indaba travel show and industry players have been invited to an e-tourism workshop, where more information on this exciting project will be made available.

South Africa Tourism is embracing the interactive possibilities offered by the Web 2.0 and will be launching a new website in April, with enhanced rich media content and dynamic journey planning capabilities. The site will include video clips of South Africa, giving potential visitors the ability to visually explore the country as they make travel plans.

Southern Africa Direct, a multi-platform destination marketing company with a television channel and website dedicated to marketing Southern Africa internationally, will contribute its resources and partner with South Africa Tourism to build the largest library of video material on South Africa to be distributed across the web.

“There has been an explosive growth in the number of people watching online video worldwide. In January alone 100 million visitors viewed 6.3 billion videos on YouTube,” said Southern Africa Direct CEO Pierre van der Hoven.

“In the travel industry especially, video is a fantastic tool to showcase what our region has to offer. Travellers have always been inspired by pretty pictures when choosing a destination to visit – now we can offer them something more: audio visual. Web surfers enjoy watching videos and tourism operators get the chance to promote their brand and products in an engaging way.”