Damian Cook- E-Tourism Africa

Damian Cook is the founder and Managing Director of E-Tourism Africa- a major continental initiative to develop online tourism in Africa, which has been supported by Microsoft, VISA EyeForTravel and many local technology providers. He has lived and travelled all over Africa- and it was his experience of working in tourism, the media and marketing that led him to see that Africa’s failure to access the online sector presented a major threat to the sustainable future of tourism. After working as a consultant in both the public and private sector developing destination websites and online marketing campaigns he formed E-Tourism Africa, which now works across the continent, training and facilitating business for the sector.

E-Tourism Africa has successfully trained over 1000 tourism professionals and has brought leading International experts and major travel firms and intermediaries to Africa to do business.

In 2009 E-Tourism Africa worked with SA Tourism to stage a highly successful day of Online Tourism Seminars at the Indaba Travel Fair in Durban.

He has made presentations to numerous international forums, including the World Information Summit in Tunis, the UN Experts Panel on E-Tourism, ITB in Berlin and the IFITT ENTER conference, as well as Presidential African inward investment presentations in China, Japan and Thailand.

Abstract :

Abstracts1:

Social Media Marketing and African travel

By Damian Cook, CEO E-Tourism Africa

As many destinations in the world struggle to close the digital divide and to begin marketing and managing their products online- they are also often failing to grasp how the internet has changed in recent years.

The role of social media, networking user generated content and viral marketing has completely revolutionized the way travel is marketed, researched and distributed globally- and to succeed in this space requires an entirely new approach to product, marketing and management.

This presentation will demonstrate this phenomena with real world multimedia examples and case studies- and then show how African tourism is ideally suited to the social media environment, and demonstrate how social media has communicated content from the region- both good and bad- with very little input or control from the region.

Demonstrations will then be made of how this could be better handled- and existing opportunities for social media networking marketing and business development will be discussed using tracked examples of local travel content.

This will include a case study of what happened when South African Tourism partnered with the world’s largest social network for travel and developed a cutting edge marketing campaign.

Abstracts2:

E-learning and capacity building in the African travel sector

By Damian Cook, CEO E-Tourism Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the least visible regions online and has fallen far behind the global marketplace for travel- with less than 2% of its travel being distributed online.

This presentation will identify the critical causes of this situation- and highlight the urgent need for capacity building and training throughout Africa for both public and private sectors.

It will also discuss the need for lobbying for change among key financial, legal and regulatory bodies to increase access to e-commerce.

The CEO of E-Tourism Africa will share their experience of working with tourism businesses and destinations in East, Southern and West Africa- including some case studies from their programmes.

Examples will be given of how empowering and educating tourism stakeholders allows small to medium enterprise, community and eco-tourism to increase their global reach, audience and revenue- and how it spreads much further than before.

Practical real world examples will be given of local stakeholders re-inventing their business models after training in online management and marketing.

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