Despite lingering travel and tourism restrictions, ECPTA launched a number of trade engagement and target market expansion initiatives over the past few months to actively promote our province.
“These sessions have enabled the ECPTA to present the province’s tourism offering, and to showcase our diverse basket of attractions to current and future tourism partners,” says Lihle Dlamini, ECPTA’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Forming part of these initiatives, ECPTA conducted destination training sessions with South African Tourism (SAT) staff members, as well as a network of trade representatives associated with Thomas Cook, SOTC Travel Limited and Akbar holidays in India.
“To ensure that the Eastern Cape offering is covered holistically, the ECPTA also invited tourism stakeholders, including numerous Eastern Cape product owners, to make individual presentations to the travel trade,” Dlamini says.
Prior to the training sessions, SAT shared an overview of the India market, which assisted with product selection and allowed product owners to streamline their presentations to suit this target market.
In addition to the India outreach, ECPTA collaborated with the trade representative for SAT in Germany to prepare a destination presentation, focused specifically on adventure options in the province, which was delivered to the German travel trade network.
Consequently, more than 370 agents were trained across Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
ECPTA also participated in a series of virtual speed marketing webinars on rural tourism in the Eastern Cape with all SAT global offices, which was attended by more than 450 trade participants.
A selection of rural tourism experiences and products were showcased, including Tshaka Tours (rural tourism and rock art), Village Dinner Experience with Coffee Shack Backpackers in Coffee Bay, African Drumbeat and The Boma Traditional Xhosa Evening in Nelson Mandela Bay, the Ganora Guest Farm Medicinal Plant Tour & Rock Art Tour in Nieu-Bethesda and a Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum tour.
