Destinations Expo Cape Town
Today’s launch of the first travel and tourism exhibition, called “Destinations Expo 2010″ in Cape Town may well be the beginning of a future oriented development.
Local Expo – International Audience
The 2010 Expo is first of all a showcase of destinations,accommodation,traveling and holidays in South Africa and other nearby destinations.
Besides all the visitors attending the event, there are millions of people out there who are potentially interested in the topic and who are seeking to satisfy their desires via the Internet.
It is therefore surprising, that the Expo itself did not come up with a decent and well positioned website for and about the event.
Or are the organizers just the play-ball of some large tourism businesses privileging their best paying acolytes?
I don’t have the answer to this question; however, from what I can see, individual hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and lodges cannot individually count on the Expo 2010 to fetch new contacts through the Internet.
While the local crowd may enjoy the event, the remaining 6.5 billion potential customers are left out. This is not really a customer oriented policy, considering that nowadays most bookings are
made online.
Destinations 2010 Cape Town and the Internet
What do you need an Expo for if you cannot reach out for new customers or if the main markets cannot be reached?
If Destination 2010 is a low tech marketing idea, then it is the more important for businesses to brand themselves in a meaningful way online.
Smart examples can be seen at LalakoiPublishing.com and http://gardenroutedirectory.com.
Also some resorts are working on projects distributing highly visible media content, such as the Monkey Valley Resort near Cape Town.
Tourism and the Internet cannot be dissociated.
May be for next years Destinations Expo 2010 the organizers will invite some website developers who in the past have provided excellent services to South African Tourism, Lalakoi Publishing from the Garden Route or Bianca Gubalke Website Developments from Noordhoek, to name just two.
