SATSA celebrated World Tourism Day this week by launching its latest campaign, which aims to newly position and showcase South Africa’s tourism offerings for local and international consumers, DMCs and tour guides – the Let’s Go movement.

While the pandemic has shaken many tourism organisations, Natalia Rosa, Communications Manager for SATSA, firmly believes that “we are closer to the end than the beginning”, and the Let’s Go amplifier campaign seeks to use this opportunity to unite related sectors and organisations to work together in an ongoing social movement.

“We are going to be flying. This is not just a SATSA movement,” says Hannelie du Toit, SATSA COO, when speaking of the upcoming 365 days filled with “more than 50 extraordinary encounters, events, and experiences to amplify energy”.

The campaign and its accompanying sub-campaigns and tactics seek to establish a new way of collaboration among stakeholders across the Tourism, Events, Arts and Culture, and Heritage (TEACH) space within the “ecosystem” that is tourism, Du Toit explains.

A part of the SATSA Plan of Plenty’s second phase, Let’s Go focuses on marketing to recover, especially to help increase Q4 2021 bookings for South Africa’s December holidays and onwards. Besides promoting responsible and inclusive tourism, Let’s Go will work to upskill the local tourism industry to incorporate TEACH experiences in their packages.

This entails hosting tourism buyers and tourist guides on several virtual and physical destination and heritage site tours; developing and amplifying existing events, meetings, and conferences to shine a spotlight on TEACH offerings; and empowering the local trade by providing a TEACH marketing toolkit and playbook along with social media posts and videos.

Beyond this, SATSA will launch a PR campaign across South Africa’s B2B and tourism trade publications, run a competition to identify the TEACH champions of South Africa, offer social media and newsletter exposure to participants, and more.