Indaba Roundup

by Rob Stokes

Earlier this week I was in Durban where I spent the weekend at the annual Tourism Indaba, which I believe is the world's 3rd largest Tourism event. And what an event it was. Huge to say the least and really worthwhile, I think, for everyone attending.

An exciting part of this year’s Indaba was the first time addition of an online marketing conference aimed specifically at the tourism industry. The event was organised by two amazing women, Fiona Buchner and Bronwen Auret who are responsible for driving the eMarketing for South African Tourism. I have to say that as a Proudly South African guy, I was super impressed by these ladies. They are so organised and understand online marketing backwards. I have a huge amount of confidence and excitement for what they are going to do to market South Africa as a tourist destination.

The conference took place on Monday, the third day of Indaba. Fiona kicked it off by reporting back to the industry the findings of the Online Travel and Tourism (OTTI) research project that was carried out by Blue River Stone. The findings were not that surprising in that they highlighted how the Internet strategies of the South African tourism industry still lag a fair way behind the rest of the world. Yes, this is concerning, but at least we now have hard facts and figures - which can only help tourism companies improve themselves in this arena and ultimately make a lot more by using the Internet as a marketing tool.

Unfortunately, I had to balance watching presentations with speaking to our clients who were at the Indaba, so I didn’t get to see everything. However, some presentations in particular I really enjoyed. Luisa Mazinta from themarketingsite.com discussed everything Web 2.0. Luisa is an awesome speaker with a real passion for teaching her subject matter and I hope to interact more with her in the future.

Diane Charlton from Acceleration gave an informative presentation on traditional online advertising, and Fiona also did another presentation in the afternoon about using email as a relationship marketing tool. Fiona is one of the few people I have ever met who truly understands the concepts of One-to-One marketing and it was great for me, as a fellow Peppers and Rogers fanatic, to hear her insights. Email is such an under utilized tool in the online marketing world and I hope Fiona went some way to change that in the tourism industry.

The final session with Lastminute.com, Safarinow and Expedia was also really informative as it’s always good to hear what the big players in online travel are up to.

I did a session offering an introduction to Search Marketing (if you're interested, here is the presentation), both SEO and PPC. I think it went down well as I got swamped with questions at the end. Search is such a vital marketing tool for tourism businesses so hopefully I encouraged a few people to experiment with it.

All in all a really rewarding experience and I thank South African Tourism for taking the proactive step of making it happen!

2007/05/18 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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