Go2SA community driven tourism portal

Its been a loooong time coming and is finally here! Our latest project is in a final Alpha stage ready to go beta! And since everybody else launches at this time more or less, We though “Why the hell NOT?”. So here is one of the reasons for my lack of blogging…

Go2sa.co.za is a community driven tourism portal. By that I mean that content is generated by the members. The members is all tourism related service providers like accommodation establishments, activity providers, restaurants, etc… everyone that service the tourists.

One thing you have to remember is that most our clients are not necessarily as “internet confident” as you are. They are people that download emails and pay accounts using internet banking and that is as far as it goes. So in order to make the process of submitting content to the site a little less painful we’ve developed a Windows application in C# and dotNet for 1) creating content offline (a lot of these guys are still on dial-up) and 2) to resize photos before they hit the web site in order to save them time and confusion.

The main drive and reason for this portal was to give the actual tourism providers the opportunity and platform to promote not only themselves, but also the town and region they are in. They can also promote places of interest that do not have any commercial value. For example a lookout point or a mountain hike or trail. Anything that is of value for tourism, but not operated for profit. It is really up to the community. In return for advertising these non-commercial places of interest we give them free advertising in the form that their listing is displayed with every item they submit.

It is not a free model. We would have loved to do that, but there is a fair amount of training and support needed and because it is so different from normal listing sites, we absolutely HAD to go sell the idea and concept to the clients. So far everyonewe’ve approached (well, accept maybe one or two) in the Garden Route signed up.

However, if you have your own blog and should you wish to contribute to this awesome system, we’ve made it extremely easy! *Nic Haralambous* was so kind to allow us to aggregate the 10 latest feeds from SA Rocks! to our blogs page and the 5 latest to the front page! Thank you very much Nic! So to contribute is easy! Contribute to SA Rocks! and you would contribute to us in indirectly.

So go to the site and tell us what you think! And if you see bugs, even better! Let us know PLEAAAASE!!!

Visit: http://go2sa.co.za

Oh, and this is our mascot Gogo, the intergalactic tourist.

technorati tags:go2sa, tourism, marketing, southafrica, sarocks

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3 Comments to "Go2SA community driven tourism portal"

• links for 2007-04-22 at Wired Gecko said: On 04/22/2007 at 5:24 am

  [...] stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Go2SA community driven tourism portal A new SA community-driven tourism portal (tags: southafrica tourism communityportal) [...]

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 04/22/2007 at 2:07 pm

  Although I have to admit that I didn’t spend too much time on the site previously, the design is indeed much improved. I think all-round it looks great and the concept behind the site looks pretty solid to me also. I like your user-centered concept of getting people in the travel industry to put content up on the web. You give them a nice package and make it easy for them - that’s what the others don’t do.

  All round, great job!

• tresblue.za.net » Blog Archive » Web Skills Divide said: On 04/23/2007 at 1:35 pm

  [...] the most frequently asked question is “what exactly, is a blog?” Stii solution as noted in his blog, was absolutely brilliant. Rather than solve the skills problem, solve the skill requirement. The [...]

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Filed in: Go2SA, South Africa by: Stii