NELSON MANDELA BAY TOURISM REACHES A WORLDWIDE AUDIENCE

Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism (NMBT) recently embarked on two international marketing excursions to showcase the destination and the offerings to a global audience. Through targeting these specific target markets NMBT hopes to increase the traffic from these destination to Nelson Mandela Bay for increased tourism visitor numbers, longer stays and increased spend.

Buenos Aires in Argentina was the first stop for Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism CEO, Ms Mandlakazi Skefile, from the 25 – 28th October 2014 to attend the International Tourism Fair. With over 1700 exhibitors representing 45 different countries, NMBT had the opportunity to expand the global reach of sharing what the destination has on offer to leisure travellers for two days and trade for the following two days. The platform also provided an opportunity to network with the staff from the South African Embassy as well as with the Ambassador, Princess Zenani Mandela - Dlamini.

“The embassy organised meetings for NMBT with main wholesalers that sell South Africa. This provided an 'exclusive' opportunity to engage directly with them to understand the extent to which our region is being featured on their travel packages, confirmed Ms Skefile, NMBT CEO. Through this visit a few of the strides among others made were to obtain greater visibility on the wholesales web-sites and an opportunity to host some of these operators next year in May when they come to attend Indaba 2015.

The next destination was London where Chief Executive Officer Mandlakazi Skefile and Marketing Manager Mr Titus Chuene attended World Trade Market (WTM) trade show from the 3 – 6th November 2014. This is one of the top 3 travel trade shows that all major cities and countries attend. UK is still one of the largest source markets for South Africa and the Eastern Cape in particular.

Ms Skefile, NMBT CEO advised, “Our results for the previous year indicated that our foreign arrivals increased however the length of stay decreased. Therefore, the purpose of our engagement with the travel trade at this event was to discuss various factors to deal with the issue of increasing length of stay.”

Meetings were held with a number of tour operators from different parts of the world. Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism marketed the destinations diverse and unique offerings to these tour operators in order to include Nelson Mandela Bay in the tour packages compiled. NMBT was able to meet up with many operators who represented a variety of country’s such as Italy, UK, Kuwait and India to name a few as well as the USA and South America Country Representative who has the possibility to market Nelson Mandela Bay to these unique markets in the future.

One of the objectives of attending WTM was to try and create media opportunities for NMB to get exposure internationally with minimum expenses. An Italian water sports magazine that is called Valtellina would like to do a feature on the Bays watersport, a Travel Editor, writer and journalist for the UK Guardian News Paper has shown interested in covering a story in Nelson Mandela Bay after a trip in December and positive meeting was held with BBC Sub Saharan Africa where NMBT will supply destination information continuously to ensure constant exposure to that market.

NMBT promoted the destination diverse product offering through a power point presentation to tour operators. This assisted us to illustrate that the city is an ideal tourism destination for various target markets. The trade was excited by the possibilities created by the pass booklet but mostly the close proximity between wild life, adventure and other activities.