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Cape Town - South Africa is performing well on TripAdvisor – one of the world’s top sources of independent travel reviews.
According to Helena Egan, the company’s head of destination marketing, TripAdvisor has about 42 million unique users a month.
Egan is a guest speaker at a conference on e-tourism being held in Cape Town this week.
In 2009 TripAdvisor had about 1.4 million hits on South Africa a month. This year the figure has risen to 1.7 million.
Apart from South Africans reading reviews on local destinations, most of the interest comes from Britain, America, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and, increasingly, China.
Prospective travellers enjoy reading the comments of other travellers, as these represent fresh content and not mere marketing material.
Most of the feedback on TripAdvisor, says Egan, is positive. Complaints are usually about dirty hotel rooms or poor service.
Crime is a subject that crops up on TripAdvisor’s expert discussion forums.
In an opinion poll, British consumers indicated that 8% paid heed to comments on Twitter, 14% to those on Facebook and 40% to online reviews of destinations.
Realmdigital chief executive Wesley Lynch asked whether it was really necessary to have one’s own website if social networks had become so popular among prospective travellers.
Realmdigital designs websites and manages their content. Lynch said websites were still important, because interest expressed on social networks about particular destinations needed to be channelled somewhere if they were to be converted into transactions.
His advice to small enterprises without the funds or staff to maintain a truly interactive website would be to start a Facebook friends page.
- Sake24
For business news in Afrikaans, go to Sake24.com.