Friday, 22 October 2010

E-Tourism Africa Conference in Cape Town

A much-hyped "summit" on e-tourism in Africa will be taking place in Cape Town on Monday and Tuesday next week (25-26 October 2010). It is put on by E-Tourism Frontiers (an organisation that I confess I don't entirely understand) and "brought to you" by South African Tourism (who are getting better at e-tourism) as well as "hosted by" Cape Town Tourism (who are getting masterful at e-tourism).

I'll be attending many of the sessions and will blog from the conference summit as well as tweet (you can follow me on kurt_a), where I'll be using the official conference summit hashtag, #etasummit.

Conference Summit organiser, Damian Cook, advises via Twitter that there will be live video streaming from the conference summit, and as soon as I have more information on that, I'll post/tweet about it.

I'm trying to go into this with an open mind, but the lead-up has been underwhelming



  • no social media used to engage potential or registered delegates in advance
  • the programme posted (by PDF) two days before the conference summit
  • no publicity of the conference summit hashtag (as far as I know, only @damiancook's one tweet mentions it, again it is #etasummit)
  • the promised promotional video for the event never materialised
  • Summit Facebook page is a re-broadcast of the @damiancook twitter feed
  • YouTube Channel has little activity (2 uploads)
  • The last post on the conference organisation's blog was in December 2009
  • and the structure of the programme looks as though the sessions will be very old-school powerpoint lecture theatre style
But let me not pre-judge things -- I've met Damian, he's well regarded and has a lot of experience doing this, so I hope to be pleasantly surprised next week.

One of the models I'll be looking to for excellent conferences includes the one that Planeta.com's Ron Mader held in Portland, OR (USA) back in September on Marketing Indigenous Tourism using Web 2.0, and I'll draw inspiration from The Future of Conferences.

If you have questions you have or that you'd like me to ask during a particular session, let me know in a comment to this post, via Twitter, or in an e-mail. And if you'll also be attending, let me know, particularly if you're tweeting / blogging as well so I can cross-reference your content too. Oh yeah, we could also meet face-to-face -- how quaint!

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2 comments:

  1. I would love to see a BarCamp style event on e-tourism in (Southern)Africa. We had a couple of tourism related BarCamps in Germany/Austria and they worked great.

    Regarding questions for the actual summit: The program looks primarily focused on direct consumer contact.

    How about open standards for efficient information flow between trade partners like hotels, dmo, tour operators etc?

    For example I would like to see an OPEN API to connect to the National Tourism Database (or the TGCSA Datebase)

    Or is a distributed solution where hotels publish their product details to the web of data the better way? E.g. using Microformats.

    Anyhow, we could/would integrate such data (eg restaurant tips) from structured sources in personalized maps like on our webpage or roadbooks we hand out to our self drive clints.

    -Harald

    ReplyDelete

  2. Thanks Harald. I agree that we would benefit from an e-tourism focus on the industry / infrastructure that would make our products and destinations more competitive, reduce costs, open opportunities, etc.

    ReplyDelete

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Blogging Hiatus

Gentle Reader,

Some five years into the life of Afrika T, I now find myself unable to keep up with contributions at a level that I and you have come to expect from this blog. Partly this is because of other activities in responsible tourism (see example here, and another here), partly from other projects in sustainability (see examples here and here), and partly for reasons that are more personal.

I am certainly still active online and in responsible travel, so feel free to comment on existing posts here, to follow me on Twitter, and to note what I've been reading online via Delicious. I also hope to return to Afrika T, so am not bringing the blog to a halt, just declaring a hiatus of indefinite duration...

Thank you for your support over the years, and, if you're a newcomer to the site, may it still prove valuable.

Kind regards

Kurt

5 December 2011