Vacation ZA tourism portal launches
16. Jul, 2009
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Vacation ZA today announces the soft launch of www.vacation.co.za, Southern Africa’s latest destination marketing website.
With all the hype around FIFA 2010 and the anticipated benefits for Southern Africa as a whole, no other industry is preparing itself at such a rate as our very own tourism sector, from new tour operators to guesthouses to whichever off beat activity that could be classified as an “adventure”…
If finding and establishing your niche in this competitive market isn’t challenging enough, trying to promote your business globally is where your energies (and money) will most probably be spent.
Not necessarily so, says David Degenaar, MD of Vacation ZA. “With the recent introduction of Web 2.0 and also the rapid convergence of mobile, GPS and web, it would be foolish not to exploit these technologies to effectively market your products and services online! This can be achieved with little effort and at a fraction of the costs associated with conventional marketing methods, provided that one employs an optimal web platform and apply the best possible techniques for search engine optimization, etc.”
“A very popular (and logical) option is to rather make use of a destination marketing organisation (DMO) website that could handle this on your behalf, allowing you to only focus on providing good content, and not having to be too concerned about maintaining your own website and reaching thousands of prospective customers.”
Degenaar further comments that at least some of the following criteria should be considered when selecting a DMO website partner:
- Relevant domain name (for example, vacation.com is North America’s largest vacation-selling network and serves more than 5,100 travel agency locations throughout the U.S. and Canada)
- Secure website access to upload and maintain your own information (this editing facility should have a familiar and friendly, non technical, user interface)
- Ability to support multiple languages, browsers (including mobile), backend systems, social networking tools and be Web 2.0 “engaged” to facilitate three-way communication between yourself, your partner, and your prospective customer
- Value added website functionality such as being able to dynamically pinpoint your exact GPS location as well as surrounding points-of-interest via an intuitive map, should get your deciding vote.
What makes the first version of the Vacation ZA portal unique is that it is essentially a “self-servicing” and “selfgrowing” web platform, allowing stakeholders to register, upload and maintain their own listing information whilst having the flexibility to add new regions, towns and vacation categories, should these not already appear on the site – this is especially useful if one considers the entire Southern Africa region with all its diversity and vastness.
We are also extremely excited and looking forward to the launch of our second iteration of Vacation ZA which will be fully Web 2.0 compliant and based on the award winning EPiServer Web Content Management (WCM) platform – early adopters of our current version though will be migrated to the latest version without any subscription increases.
My name is Muzi Mohale a full-time travel blogger, your host at Travelwires.com responsible for all editorial on this blog. I blog about the travel and tourism industry in Africa. Apart from blogging about tourism, I also run 
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