By Ramadhani Ismail & Lucy Tomeka
What you need to know:
How do you best tell the tales of your homeland? In many African cultures, songs and folklore were the primary means of expressing the grandeur found in Africa.
However, you had to be there to truly witness its magic.
Today, these cultures and folklore also make up a good portion of tourism attractions and how we tell them to our visitors and potential visitors has changed drastically.
Today, with options right at our fingertips and innovation ensuring stories get to the visitor even before they physically arrive, the opportunities for tourist attractions continue to grow as big as we allow them.
Fahamu Safaris, a tour operating company located in the safari capital, Arusha, has taken up a unique opportunity that came with technology and made selling Tanzanian destinations a unique experience for prospective tourists.
For co-founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Solomon Michael, tourism was a fascinating field.
As a young boy who got to see a lot of tourist vehicles, his dream was to one day run an operation of his own, especially considering he came from Mwanza, where this was not very common.
A software engineer by qualification, the path to tourism was not a very linear one.
After finishing university, he found himself holding a lucrative job with USAID-funded projects. For a while, he forgot about tourism.
“These projects do come to an end, and I began wondering what I could do so I wouldn’t go back to employment. During this time, I was talking to a friend who had already been in the tourism industry for a long time. He gave me the ABCs of the business and I figured, 'Why not start my own tourism company?'” Solomon shares.
“I already had all this knowledge in technology and I knew that I could incorporate that into tourism,” he adds.
Solomon went into business with his friend and, together, ran their company for a few months and then Covid-19 hit.
When the pandemic slowed down, he had to figure out how to push the company, especially since they did not have any tour agents working with them.
Most tour companies owe their success to agents who bring them clients because they are located in their targeted markets.
In an effort to work around the tour agent hurdle in front of him, he had to do plenty of research, which led to the realisation that people would rather get on their phones and browse for their destinations and with this technological shift, he saw an opportunity to latch on.
“I figured, why not create my own website and do my own SEOs and ads? And so I built the first company website myself, from scratch,” Solomon shares.
“It wasn’t the best I could have done considering I still had employment responsibilities, but the vision of how I could incorporate technology started to take a clearer shape.
“While Fahamu Safaris offers tourism experiences similar to many other operators, one thing that has set the company apart is how they have taken to augmented reality (AR) to entice visitors to visit Tanzania.
This merger of technology came as a result of the demand for travel during global lockdowns as a result of Covid-19.
One of the major markets that Fahamu Safaris keyed into was Germany.
He credits this lucrative market as being one filled with a large population of people who are known to be travellers.
This early decision to zero in on specific targets was very crucial to Fahamu Safaris in terms of cost management and resources allocated towards advertising and marketing efforts.
“When selling anything, you need to build trust and for us, we were faced with the question of how we could build trust with these people,” he says.
“Two of the key decisions we made were hiring talent that spoke German and creating a website that catered specifically to that market,” he shares.
With all this done, Solomon says they still had to sell Tanzania beyond the normal.
When you attend trade shows and conferences, you need to be able to convince potential buyers why Tanzania is a must and why they should choose Fahamu Safaris to be their host and guide.
You also need to leave a lasting impression so that they have no choice but to want to work with you.
This is where AR came into being for the company.
Instead of spending so much time talking about what is and isn’t, the team put together informative video clips embedded in postcard-like cards that one could take along and, with their phone cameras, scan and learn about Tanzania.
The use of AR has helped the company stand out, drawing in both tech-savvy and tech-curious visitors to work with them.
This use of technology offers tourists a preview of the experiences that await them in Tanzania.
In addition to AR, the team is also looking at the potential that virtual reality (VR) experiences can offer to further boost tourism in Tanzania.
Unfortunately, this type of tourism is not cheap and as Solomon can attest, putting together the AR cards alone cost the company quite a sum.
“Capital for tourism is already a major challenge and while emerging technologies such as the AR that we use can be a game changer, I also recognise that it may still be hard for some,” he says.
This, he says, is a result of the fact that availability and adaptation of this technology are still very low in Tanzania and he shares that the only company he is aware of that currently leverages this technology for creating AR and VR visuals is OnaStories.
“We are also faced with the challenge of a lack of talent that is not only capable of developing this technology but also implementing and sustaining it,” he says. He adds that while tourism is a very lucrative industry, the sad reality is that boots-on-the-ground are still wary of accepting technology as a potential tool to boost the industry.
“For young people coming out of university, I would advise that you look at integrating technology within the sector because it can be used in so many ways beyond marketing destinations or attracting visitors,” he shares.
A change of perceptions is key for young people entering the workforce.
“Many often assume that studying ICT translates directly into jobs in that specific area, but technology is just a tool and those skills can be used in many different ways,” he says.
“Learn to think outside the box to grow your expertise,” he adds.
Nurturing these skills would also be made easier with supportive frameworks that help entrepreneurs build technology that can benefit the country’s tourism sector.
“Fahamu Safari’s experiment and successful roll-out of AR-enabled marketing merchandise is proof that, where technology is concerned, we are only as small or as big as we allow our minds to dream,” he notes.
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