|
|
AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
African tourism destinations on the Internet: How to bridge digital and business networks divides?
| Panel |
1. Tourism in Africa
|
| Paper ID | 234 |
| Author(s) |
Wijk, Jeroen van; Go, Frank ; Govers, Robert
|
| Paper |
No paper submitted
|
| Abstract | The Internet has become an indispensable tool in tourism marketing. International travel management systems, tour operators, and tourists increasingly use the Internet for their transactions. Participation in digital tourism networks is required for any African destination that wants to benefit from the globally growing tourism business. This paper deals with the routes that African tourism suppliers have taken to present themselves to the international market through the Internet. The focus is particularly on the effects of these routes for the image formation of tourism destinations. Our theoretical approach is a combination of destination-image theory and political economy.
Africa has two contrasting images in the outside world. The western mass media, on the one hand, associate the continent with war, hunger and diseases, while on the other hand brochures of international tour operators depict Africa as a beautiful frontier area, where adventurous travelers can explore nature and wilderness. The Internet offers African tourism suppliers opportunities to present alternative images, for example those that include more ‘peoples’ and cultural aspects as dimensions that may deliver joyful tourist experiences. However, the extent to which these opportunities can be utilized largely depends on the tourism suppliers’ capability to access the Internet. In the paper it is hypothized that urban tourism supplier networks have better access to the Internet than have rural suppliers.
The paper tackles the following questions:
1. Who are the owners of the tourism web sites in the selected sub-Saharan African countries?
2. Judged from the hyperlinks, which networks can be distinguished between the websites?
3. Which are the differences in the induced destination image between the networks?
4. In what manner do small-scale tourism service suppliers use the Internet for marketing purposes?
The project was carried out in 2006 and examined 468 tourism websites from three African countries: Rwanda, Uganda and Mozambique. Only websites that represented a tourism business that is physically located in these countries were included. It was estimated that the sample covered over 90 per cent of all relevant tourism websites. Some provisional conclusions are:
1. Foreigners play a very important role in bridging Africa’s digital divide in tourism. Foreign companies provide Internet access to tourism suppliers to a very large extent (Uganda , Rwanda) or almost entirely (Mozambique). The ownership of the tourism portals is largely foreign, while the share of nationals among website owners is small.
2. Portals owned by nationals predominantly link to urban primary tourism suppliers. Rural tourism suppliers (e.g. rural accommodations, community-based tourism projects, rural artisans) seem to benefit from foreign web assistance for their international marketing.
3. Content analysis is still on its way. Preliminary results indicate that rural tourism suppliers emphasize the cultural and ‘people’ aspects more than urban stakeholders do. Foreign ICT support seems to support not only rural tourism stakeholders, but also more people-centered tourism image in the three countries.
|
|