When properly managed and marketed, tourist routes can be a very effective means of attracting tourists, especially in a context where experiential travel and personal encounters with local people are growing in popularity. Sue van Winsen spoke to experts to find out what has to happen behind the scenes to make a route successful.

Over the past decade many local and provincial tourism authorities have used trade shows as a platform to launch newly devised tourist routes – many of which no longer seem to exist, just a few short years later.

According to Francois Viljoen, Managing Director at Open Africa, while many routes are started with good intentions, they often end up becoming a once-off brochure project. “Establishing a route is not very difficult. The difficulty is establishing it in a way that will ensure that it is still around in five or 10 years. This is easier said than done and we are still learning after doing this for 20 years.”

The negative consequences of this can be far-reaching and extremely damaging. Firstly, by not managing routes on an ongoing basis, you run the risk of failing to meet tourists’ expectations. Viljoen says: “Information becomes outdated almost immediately, so you can end up putting something on the market that will give inaccurate information in as little as three months. This means that visitors are left confused and irritated. When doing this in your own business, the damage can be controlled but when doing it with a route that has 50 members, the damage is far more widespread.

Secondly, there can be significant damage to communities, who may feel that they were led to believe that the route would have an immediate and lasting impact on their business. “When the route fails after a year, people become cynical about any kind of tourism development and this makes it very difficult to get buy-in to any future initiatives,” adds Viljoen.

Matthew Drew, Fundraising and Strategy Manager for the N3 Gateway, agrees with Viljoen’s views: “Creating expectations and not meeting them is always a danger in any project but particularly when it comes to those that involve disadvantaged rural communities. One of the other problems related to failure or sub-standard execution is that money is often wasted. This has a number of negative consequences such as disappointed funders who may not be too keen to support tourism development projects in the future.”

So what are some of the factors that differentiate sustainable and long-lasting tourist routes? According to Viljoen, successful routes need to have a dedicated team of people who actively manage and market the route. “It’s also important to understand your positioning in the market and differentiate [yourself] based on the unique features and characteristics of the area,” he says. Some of the other important aspects include an active membership who buy in to the values of the route and actively contribute to its strategy and plan. Viljoen adds that routes should be private-sector driven, with backing from government.

Drew adds that routes should by driven by demand and comprise a strong primary tourist attraction, supported by a good mix of secondary tourist attractions and facilities, while accessibility and political stability are also key.

Both mention continuous marketing as one of the most critical success factors. “Without marketing, the routes ceases to exist,” says Viljoen. “The way we do this today is a very different to 10 years ago and routes will have to understand social media and how to effectively use it to market their areas. The fact that a route is made up of individual businesses is a great opportunity for social media, since you have many more people who can talk about the route. It needs a co-ordinated effort, however, so the foundation of the route needs to be solid and people need to understand that by selling their neighbours they are creating future value for their own business,” he adds.

Drew says: “Word of mouth is still considered by many to be the best form of marketing but, in order to get people there in the first place, the branding, packaging and marketing of the routes must be excellent. There is often a long lag between marketing and purchasing, so routes should take a long-term view on their marketing efforts.”   

By having these aspects in place, tourist routes will be well positioned to tackle the many challenges they are likely to face. For example, says Drew, many routes rely on volunteer committees, which makes it difficult to ensure consistency. “Marketing routes involves attending tourism shows, producing high-quality print materials, generating content, being active on social media, understanding digital marketing and innovating to ensure that you appeal to the ever-changing needs and expectations of tourists. This is not to say that volunteers behind many routes aren’t committed, but they can only give so much time and energy as they often have their own businesses to run. What the N3 Gateway has found works well is a combination of paid human resources and volunteers,” he says.

What many people fail to appreciate is the significant amount of time it takes for tourist routes to take off. “The N3 Gateway is still a young route and nearly eight years old. The Midlands Meander has now been in existence for 30 years and is often hailed as an example of what can be achieved through route development, but people sometimes overlook the fact that it took a long time to truly blossom,” says Drew.

Viljoen agrees: “Anyone can start a route on paper but if you are not interested in a long-term commitment and don’t have the buy-in of the tourism industry players in your area, rather focus your efforts on something else. The same applies to government, as many of our local and district municipalities have something about route development in their local development plans, but they see it as a once-off project that can be completed in a year. Unfortunately, experience shows this is not the case.”