WHL: Elevating Experiential Travel
To download a printable pdf summary of this project, click here
Project Title | Project-Exposure: Elevating Experiential Travel Empowering South African Low Income Tourism Providers |
Project Partners | WHL Consulting, Raw Africa, Induna Adventures |
Location | Mpumulanga and KwaZulu-Natal |
Funding | Business Trust: R2,361,733 |
WHL: R2,789,743 | |
Project Challenge | Globally, experience-based tourism (nearly equivalent to the adventure tourism market and inclusive of a broad range and level of activities) is growing considerably. Traditionally, adventure travel was geared toward the youth market but more and more the baby boomer generation is seeking out experience-based and adventure travel options. And no longer does adventure travel refer to extreme sport activities but rather encompasses a wide array of activities including wildlife encounters, culture-based interactions, voluntourism and traveller philanthropy trips, social and education programs and off the beaten track explorations. The international market is looking for authentic tourism products and especially in South Africa they are looking to connect with local people. This industry demand for Adventure Travel is making this niche one of the fastest growing travel sectors, but even with all of this emphasis, matching the truly authentic interesting products with the consumer has been extremely difficult. And for the consumer the real challenge is how to find these adventures in a reliable trust-worthy platform. WHL aims to be this platform. All of the activities that have been designed in the project allow WHL to identify, evaluate and assist local entrepreneurs to build, further enhance, promote and sell innovative experience-based tourism products through various sales channels (the whl.travel booking platform being just one of them). The other main challenge of MSMEs in tourism is their low cash flow and small margins which dont provide them with working capital to invest in business expansion, skills or capacity development. There are many service providers that offer similar development services but MSMEs dont have the ability to finance the services. Potentially the most innovative piece to addressing this challenge of the industry is building of a new payment facilitation tool called the Tourism Development Bank (http://www.tourdevbank.com). The Tourism Development Bank is a formal barter based payment mechanism that allows accommodation providers to convert empty room stock into a tradable asset and be able to purchase goods and services they really need to improve their overall competitiveness. WHL is testing this model in the project with Market Access tools (professional photography, virtual tours, professional marketing copy, e-commerce enabled websites, etc) and may have opportunity to test other service offerings like training or energy efficiency through the Tourism Development Bank.
|
Expected Project Impact
|
|
