It was a Two City Success story for our 7th E-Tourism Africa Summit 2014 held in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. The twin summits brought together some of the world’s leading online tourism and travel experts, including speakers from Facebook, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Google and Twitter.
Now in its seventh year, e-TAS was hosted by South African Tourism and Gauteng Tourism Authority hosted the Johannesburg event. More than 300 people attended in Cape Town and the 200 seats for Johannesburg were sold out. During both events the hashtag #ETAS14 generated an online buzz, trending on Twitter nationally in South Africa for over four days often at the number one spot and the hashtag generated a reach of over 37 million.
In his opening address, South African Tourism Minister Hanekom said tourists who shared their experiences on social media were a source of “real, credible, unmediated communication” for other travellers. “This is part of keeping our competitive edge as we creatively rethink travel.”
E-Tourism Frontiers CEO Damian Cook said he was impressed with how much the event had advanced and matured over the past seven years. “This year’s summit has certainly been our most successful event to date. We were privileged to have international speakers from Twitter for the first time, Facebook, Google, Trip Advisor and Twitter, and we have been inundated with emails and tweets from both the speakers and delegates on how useful they found the content and how inspiring the presentations were.”
Headlining the second morning’s proceedings in Cape Town was popular public speaker Vusi Thembekwayo, who gave an inspirational talk on how to do business in Africa, which, he said, presented a wealth of opportunities for those who had the courage to enter these diverse and complex markets.
Highlights of the event can be seen here:
Other speakers were Helena Egan of TripAdvisor, Billy Lousteau of Facebook, Brett St Clair from Google, Sonal Patel of Twitter, Spencer Spellman from Expedia, Alana Witt of Revinate, Tim Davey from onefinestay, Sally Broom of Tripbod, Paul Galatis of Yuppie Chef, Sylvian Bosc of SAA, Instagrammer Gareth Pon and Charel van Dam of iAmsterdam.
ETAS15 will be back in South Africa next year!!
