CAPE Town Tourism next month formally launches its new, improved website www.capetown.travel, upping its game in the competitive and fast-paced e-marketing world.
 
Work on the website began in November 2008 and went live on December 16 during an initial pilot phase. More content will be added in May. Online bookings of accommodation, restaurants, tours and attractions will go live in June/July.
 
CTT ceo, Mariëtte du Toit-Helmbold, told a members’ meeting in Cape Town on Monday (February 23) the new portal and web strategy were the association’s single biggest investment to date. She said e-marketing was particularly important in the current tough economic times. To stay competitive, the private and public sectors needed to be brave enough to invest even more in e-marketing than before.  The Internet, she said, was the second biggest marketing tool after word-of-mouth, which in turn was being replaced by web-based social networking. Rather than relying on official tourism websites, more than 20% of customers trusted content-generated platforms where web-users shared their own experiences.
 
Tara Turkington, of website developer Flow Communications, said the company had drawn on international best practice, including the official websites of London, New York, Sydney and Vancouver.
 
Features of Capetown.travel included:
* A revolving slideshow of Cape Town’s top-six attractions
* ‘My itinerary’: a key feature enabling browsers to save events, tours, attractions and accommodation they found interesting in their own itinerary and e-mail it to themselves and others
* Well-written and researched write-ups about the top 100 destinations
*  An accommodation database
* Blogs, encouraging informal reviews, published daily
* An events calendar
* General information pages (weather, best wining and dining, transport, etc)
 
Turkington said CTT’s e-marketing strategy included search engine optimisation, blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube, affiliate marketing (links to member sites), event marketing, e-newsletters, a Flickr group (already had 200 members and 2 000 images), e-mails and user-generated content.
 
So far the website had drawn interest from 200 countries, but 76% of browsers were South Africans, 6,6% were from the UK, 4,9% from the USA, 1,4% from Germany and 0,8% from Canada.
 
She said the aim was to double traffic to the city in the next year, to become one of the top-ranking sites worldwide and to encourage more Capetonians to become users.