MARKET NEWS

Tourism KZN Trade Roadshows aim to attract more visitors to KZN.

KwaZulu-Natal’s tourism trade is getting its own vaccine to fight the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on this once thriving industry.

While domestic tourism has restarted after lockdowns were eased and is helping to mitigate the impact on jobs and businesses, Tourism KZN is giving the tourism trade booster shots to help participants to become more resilient and to fight back against the effects of the scourge.

Side-by-side with restoring traveller confidence, TKZN is also supporting tourism businesses to adapt and survive and is showing them how to cushion the blow to leisure and business travel.

TKZN continues to stamp confidence in the tourism sector by connecting with their trade partners across the province to develop, promote and market tourism into and within the province.

As part of the KZN Tourism Recovery Plan to rebuild the tourism economy, TKZN has embarked on a robust domestic campaign of trade roadshows within KZN to increase the quality of awareness of TKZN’s services, to showcase special deals offered on the website and to strengthen relationships and the flow of communication between TKZN and the district municipalities.

Phindile Makwakwa, acting chief executive officer of Tourism KZN, said: “The objective of this campaign is to provide a platform for the trade partners to understand the status of tourism in business, build a strong emphasis on safety travel measures, and increase awareness on the range of activities available in KZN.

“Through our interactions with the trade, we want our partners to collaborate with our campaigns to drive local arrivals to the province, continue to provide TKZN with special offers in order to reinforce the value-for-money proposition and help TKZN track traction of campaigns by communicating bookings with us.”

Roadshows will be hosted across various district municipalities over the next month, including Harry Gwala, Umgungundlovu, Uthukela and Umzinyathi.

The campaign will be marketed across various media platforms with the aim of being in people’s faces 24/7 to keep KZN destinations top-of-mind when travelling.

Cheryl Peters, acting chief executive officer at Enterprise iLembe Economic Development Agency, said: “The trade roadshows delivered by TKZN are extremely useful and an insightful engagement specifically to educate people about what the entity did during the pandemic and to share future plans to rebuild the KZN tourism sector.

“We are grateful to TKZN for doing a fantastic job in raising the profile of domestic marketing in KZN, to attract more tourists to visit and steadily promote the beautiful province of KZN to the public.”

Paul Jeffreys, one of the owners at Wild 5 Adventures on the KZN South Coast, said: “It was good to have received diverse feedback from TKZN on how the tourism sector is performing, especially given the impact that Covid-19 had on many businesses globally.

“It was valuable to see how TKZN is marketing their various campaigns across KZN and that they would like to collaborate with their trade partners to drive more visitors to the province.”