WITH tourists increasingly preferring to
shop for tour packages online, Tanzanian tour operators find themselves faced
with an uphill but inevitable task of adapting to online marketing techniques.
The most important global trend in marketing is the changing of consumers’
shopping behaviour towards heavy use of online marketing tools and online
sources of information and reservation systems, notes Devota Mdachi, Acting
Director General of Tanzania Tourist Board. This trend necessitates tourism
related businesses in the supply side to be competent computer literate in
particular the use of internet, development of catchy website contents and
regular updating of the contents. Tanzania has over 200 tour operators
registered under the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (TATO) based in
Arusha. They compete in the market to cater for some 1.2 million tourists
arriving annually, according to latest official statistics. Tour operators
seriously realise the importance of online marketing. “There is no question that
online marketing is currently the leading way of getting tourists from abroad,”
notes Mishely Ivan, Operations Manager for Dar es Salaam based White Lion Tours
Ltd, one of the fastest growing tour companies in the country. Keen to move
with time, the TTB has just launched an ambitious strategy to market
Destination Tanzania. In collaboration with private sector through Tourism
Confederation of Tanzania (TCT) the board has developed a new five year
International Marketing Strategy that focuses on a few selected markets and
highlights use of the information superhighway. Says Mdachi on the strategy:
“It highlights the use of digital and online marketing techniques which have
been given high importance.” But how fast are tour operators in Tanzania
evolving in order to use the latest and most effective techniques in the online
marketing era? Not fast enough, at least according to the TTB official. Notes
Mdachi: “For sure, the majority of tour operators are less competent in
adapting to this global consumers trend.” But there is a catch to this. Like in
many distribution channels for service and product delivery, the middleman is
well-established in the tourism business, to a large extent screening off local
tour operators from directly accessing to tourists abroad. International
tourism marketing business is monopolised by a vast network of multinational
tour agents, big companies with extensive global networks. According to Ivan,
the agents promote themselves extensively in Europe and America, the leading
sources of tourists jetting into Tanzania. “Foreign tourism agents for instance
in the Netherlands have access to extensive TV coverage where they advertise
for up to seven times a day”, he says. Ivan points out that a good website is
essential, but notes that it is not enough. “After designing a good website,
the website must be advertised on TV.
You don’t just design a website and wait
for tourists to log on to it. However good it is, if it is not aggressively
promoted no tourists will even know about it, let alone visit it.” He notes
that expertise in websites is needed. Yet to get a very good design cost up to
two thousand dollars, “It should be the best website,” he notes, although he
instantly says two thousand dollars is expensive for small tour operators. Ivan
continues: “The foreign tour agents don’t advertise us in any way, they simply
promote themselves as the gateways to the preferred destinations. After getting
the customers and closing the deals they forward them to tour operators in
Tanzania and elsewhere.” Ivan notes that it is a great challenge for tour
operators in Tanzania, because they don’t have direct access to the tourists.
Despite it being difficult to have direct contacts, the truth is that all
successful companies in Tanzania have tour agents abroad. To advertise online
one must go to Europe, and hook up with TV and radio stations. “Then you need
to pay a lot of money to have a lot of adverts, and you can only do so that by
purchasing a large airtime package.” This situation, he notes, necessitates
tour operators to have a very large capital. The situation is made complex by
the fact that most Europeans prefer to shop online from domestic agents,
because first they feel very secure and second for the very reason that they
feel comfortable when contacting someone they feel are closer to them. Says
Ivan: “That is where the biggest marketing challenge lies, most of the tourists
don’t shop online straight from us. It is very rare to find a tourist who logs
into a website and charts direct with a tour operator in Tanzania.” From his
experience, he says over 70 per cent of the deals are closed through agents.
However, this online marketing challenge affects mostly smaller companies,
which cannot raise the large capital needed for traveling and advertising. This
has crated a sort of divide among the tour operators in country. Says Ivan:
“You find that automatically, Tanzanian tour operators are divided into two:
the big companies that rake in huge profits and the smaller companies that
struggle to survive.” And there is a trickier twist to the middleman’s affair
with online tourism marketing. Bigger and well established tour operators in
Tanzania who are connected to international agents get discounted accommodation
rates form some hotels. As a result of this arrangement, which in tourism
circles is dubbed ‘contract pricing’, they are able to quote lower prices in
their packages and enjoy competitive advantages. “We cannot compete with them
because our packages that we send to agents will be dearer,” says Ivan, noting
that in some case the price differential is s large as USD 60. He notes that
accommodation is the crucial component in tour package pricing, because other
charges like transport are relatively uniform across the board. Pack and
camping fees, which are paid to Tanzania National Park, are fixed. It is
debatable if contract pricing here amounts to unfair competition. The big tour
operators get discount by the virtue of the large number of tourists they take
to the hotels. The large number of hotel reservation is a fruit of connections
to tour agents and advertising, which themselves were shouldered by a larger
capital base.
SOURCE:
Daily News
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