Ed's Note: Mary is currently touring a few countries in Africa with the E-Toursim Road Show, chatting about eMarketing possibilities in Africa. She’ll be sending updates when she can. The latest installment below:

I arrived at the hotel where the seminar was being held - Hotel Africana  - to discover that The Last King of Scotland was filmed here. It certainly evokes another era. The room where the seminar was held slowly filled up and I was surprised to see more seats being added as more delegates arrived.

The delegates were enthusiastic about tourism and listened attentively to presentations from Damian Cook, Visa and Nightsbridge.

I spoke in two sessions over the two days and tried to keep my sessions as interactive as possible – asking questions and rewarding the correct answer with a Quirk book. So, from this I learned some interesting things:

• Only 2 people in the room had run paid search campaigns
• Not one person was authoring a blog
• No one in the room had any information on how their email performed
• Only one person in the room was not sending their mail via Outlook (interestingly they all knew that as they were using outlook they could only send 25 mails per batch)

Despite all of this, the delegates were enthusiastic and excited – after the presentations, I had a long line of people with USB sticks requesting a copy of the presentation. Thank goodness I have virus checker – each USB stick had a virus (sorry Grant W my baby seems to be fine).

The travel trade in Uganda faces some challenges when it comes to technology. The fact that everyone had USBs (some had as many as 10) and that they actively avoided anything that directed them to the Web to download the presentation pretty much proves it. They are, however, hungry to be online and to market their products – since the event a few are now on Twitter.

Access to an affordable Internet connection is holding back their efforts to market. The pain they experience when they log into their CMS systems to update websites and it takes minutes to upload makes things difficult. Similar issues arise with the pain of uploading images and the torture of waiting for Twitter to upload just so they can send out one Tweet. Many of my fellow QuirkStars would suffer from angst if faced with these challenges every day.

Despite this these tour operators, hoteliers and product owners (from rafting to gorilla tours) are hungry for success. They also know that digital is the only way they can have it.

Onwards to Rwanda now… 
 
Did you enjoy this post? Why not check out:

• Shopping Online in South Africa: Part Two
• How to Save Bandwidth
• Customer Management World Africa