Tourism in South Africa is showing a welcome recovery from its losses last year. The good Summer season will have operators and products back in their comfort zone and less vocal about the future.

So predictably, the next challenge and trend wave, which is already becoming a swell close to our shores, will be ignored until it breaks over us and causes massive disruption

 To turn this disruption into a competitive advantage, we need to embrace a new marketing strategy that focuses on championing the tourism experience delivered to our customers. This strategy needs to focus heavily on the local level of tourism. This is where experiences happen and where our future brand will be decided.

We need to invert our current approach to a bottom-up focus and strategy.

Our major country competitors are already a few years into the implementation of this strategy. They are proactively coaching their local products on how to deliver the new experience expectations and connect on an emotional level with their customers.

I hate losing to the Aussies, but they are miles ahead of us. The approaching disruption is being driven by the exploding connectivity of our customers. They are now able to compare multiple destinations throughout the world on their mobile devices.

The big change is that our future customers will be less influenced by our products and our promotional efforts, and progressively more strongly influenced by the social media posts and ratings on sites such as TripAdvisor by our current customers. The fact is that these third-party postings are more trusted than our promotional efforts in the decision-making flow of our potential customers.

This social messaging growth already dwarfs our traditional promotional efforts and this has dramatically changed our brand dynamics. Our brand is now what our current customers say it is.

This creates a new point of influence. The tourism experiences delivered at a local level to our current customers, and how we connect with them on an emotional level, are the keys to our desirability and continued success as a destination brand.

Local tourism organisations and their members’ tourism experiences need to become the top priority for tourism stakeholders and departments throughout South Africa if our growth momentum is to be maintained in the medium-term. The local bodies and their members need an enhanced set of skills as the quality of our visitors’ tourism experiences become the most important driver of our destination South Africa brand.

The building blocks of future successes are authentic, immersive and personalised experiences being delivered to our visitors at every step of their journey. These experiences need to engage the emotions of our visitors, inspiring them to share these moments on social media and rate them highly on referral sites.

In essence, we want to turn our visitors into our marketing department.

The first step is that we need to look at our experiences from our customers’ point of view. We need to understand what drives their emotions and understand why they do what they do in our destinations.

South Africa has built its brand based largely on the experiences provided by its wonderful natural assets and physical attractions. Encounters need to transform from look-and-tell to immersion and personal interaction.

We urgently need to move our marketing at a local level from the one-way push style of our current promotional messages to a strategy of customer engagement.

Towns that rely largely on tourism are especially at risk. The towns operate with small budgets and limited staff, and have not been exposed to these trends or been coached in how to engage with their experience providers. They also do not have the access to the training that destination marketers in the metros have.

There is a need to coach the product owners in these towns and ensure that a team vision is build and collaboration throughout the country becomes a reality.

The upside for towns is that they often have the authentic experiences that, if well presented, our visitors will value and be attracted to. To be competitive in the medium term, the tourism industry will need a team approach by all organisations and stakeholders in South Africa.

Imagine the entire local tourism industry focussed on the same vision and collaborating in turning visitors into our promoters throughout the world. This can only be achieved by urgently re-focussing a significant amount of our effort and resources on the local level where tourism experiences happen.

Current efforts to engage this level barely create a ripple and we need a tsunami. There is an urgent need to encourage a shift in the focus of national organisations and departments to include local tourism as a top priority.

The building blocks for a leap of faith are authenticity, collaboration, emotional experiences and positive word-of-mouth.

Our country competitors have stolen the march on South Africa and the time for apathy and silos is now over. We need to act now and be a fearless team driven by a shared vision!