Interview with Damian Cook, E-Tourism Africa founder

Please introduce yourself and your educational background?
My name is Damian Cook and I am the CEO of E-Tourism Africa and I have worked in tourism and the media for 20 years.

What is your business all about and what inspired it?
We are working to develop the online tourism sector across Africa by hosting conferences, training seminars and business facilitation events. I worked in tourism and media for many years and saw a frightening trend right across Africa as tourism around the world made a rapid shift online, the tourism sector in Africa was failing to keep pace. This threatened our sustainability as destinations as we were increasingly invisible in the predominant marketplace. E-Tourism Africa was created to tackle this challenge head on.

What were you doing before launching your business?
I worked in the tourism business, managing lodges and I was also a consultant for a variety of tourism projects. I then began working with destinations to develop and manage their content and as content became critical to marketing, so did online and this set me on the path to creating E-Tourism Africa.

How did you know there is a market for your business?
It was clear from working in tourism, at both a private sector and destination level that Africa was not keeping pace with global trends and that there was tremendous need for help and to be shown what was happening in other destinations.

What planning did you engage before launching?
A lot of the advance work was awareness raising and education not just of the local African stakeholders, but demonstrating to global intermediaries and online travel sellers that there was a lot of untapped potential in Africa.

How many people do you employ?
It varies depending on the event we are holding, outside of office and registration staff we recruit and manage teams of up to 30 international speakers and trainers.

Are there any major challenges that you had to overcome before launching your business?
Raising a lot of awareness and securing the right partnerships to be sure that our events and seminars are world class, professionally managed and locally appropriate.

Is your business affiliated to any professional trade body?
We always partner with the local tourism authorities and private sector associations in any destination we work in, to be sure that we are reaching the right people and encouraging change from the very top.

We also work with many very well known companies and brands.  For the E Tourism Africa Summit which is taking place on the 1-2 December in Johannesburg, Visa and Vodacom are the two lead sponsors.

Social media is the current buzz word, do you use it to market your business?
Social media is our business! It is the core message of everything we do. If used well, it can reinvent and reinvigorate tourism businesses and destinations and it levels the playing field and creates a platform for the smallest supplier with an unusual product or service to find the right clientele.

It both strengthens and diversifies our Tourism sectors.

What three industry blogs do you read to keep abreast of your sector of the market?
This is our core business, so I subscribe to as many travel blogs as possible, there are many excellent African travel blogs (Travelwires included!) but also social media blogs and updates such as Mashable and South Africa’s own Quirk. It’s also great to see blogging heading into new directions, such as Wild Earth’s live streamed game drives.

Given an opportunity to contribute content on an industry blog, would you welcome that offer?
Sure, we have our own blog but always love to contribute more.

How important is your website to the daily operations of the business and are you happy with its current state?
It’s how we inform and register delegates for our events and now looking at ways to build interactive online training modules.

Within your industry, who do you idolize and given an opportunity to work with, you wouldn’t think twice?
One of the great things about what we do is that we get to invite some of the world’s leading companies and innovative thinkers to our events, so we get to work with and interact with some great and talented individuals and introduce them to the local market.

One of our keynote speakers is Jerome Touze, the co- founder of WAYN.com the largest travel focused social networking site in the world with over 15 million members.  Jerome is very inspirational and he started up WAYN.com in his early twenties and he has only just turned 30.

What are your current business challenges that you still have to overcome?
We are seeing change happen, but still not to the degree that we need for African tourism to be on an equal footing with the rest of the world. There are infrastructural and legal obstacles to true e-commerce, but more importantly a lot of change needed in the way we think about our businesses and some major cultural changes needed in many organizations.

We believe in not just talking about problems but finding and offering realistic solutions.

What are your short and long-term business plans?
Africa is a big place with so much tourism potential, we are always looking for new places to train stakeholders and hold events. We are moving strongly into West and North Africa now. Ultimately we want to see so many new and innovative technologies and products coming out of Africa that we are the ones showing the world how to do it.

Please share with us your major business highlights since being in operation?
There have been many. Last year we brought Jerome Touze, the founder and CEO of Wayn.com (the world’s largest social network for travel) to Joburg for our event there and from his presentations and discussions on the power of social media, he worked with South African Tourism to create and run a major social media campaign for the destination that had amazing results.

We also held a session on youth entrepreneurship and technology for 300 young people in Nairobi, Kenya in October last year, which was extremely successful. Even the Vice President of Kenya came along and took apart.

This year we held a training seminar in Uganda during which we proposed an unusual idea- that they put their entire population of endangered mountain gorillas on Facebook and let potential clients and donors form personal relationships with them. Jut a few months later, they launched a project to do this and in just a few weeks of operation have had over 8,000 people sign up.

It’s great when you see change happening before your eyes. When we held our E-tourism seminars at Indaba this year I met delegates from our event in South Africa last year who had now entirely reinvented their businesses and were making sales online.

In closing, how do potential clients reach your business?
They can visit www.e-tourismafrica.com and most importantly they can come along to one of our events. We will be hosting a fantastic two-day E-Tourism Africa Summit in Johannesburg on the 1-2nd December which will feature some of the world’s best online experts such as Google, Expedia and TripAdvisor.  We will also be staging a two-day travel technology exhibition, alongside the summit, so delegates can meet local companies who are offering great digital and online marketing solutions.

Registration for the E Tourism Africa Summit is now open.

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