Growing The Tourism Ecosystem
“How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver” — Proverbs 16:16
For The “Year of Return, Ghana 2019”, Ghana reportedly recorded about 750,000 inbound arrivals and an estimated $1.87bn spent by visitors, according to the Deputy Minister for Tourism Arts and Culture, Dr Ziblim Iddi Barri (as reported by GhanaWeb). Tourism is a massive goldmine but we don’t seem to have enough miners in Nigeria.
Sometime in Q2–2018, we discovered the deep relationship between Tourism and what we do at WeMove Technology, offering a vehicle hire marketplace. Since going full-time in January 2018, we consistently serviced bookings from local tourism practitioners, so we decided to better understand their needs. I wrote a post about what we did in Q4–2018 to serve them better.
Since then we’ve sponsored tourism meetups, sat on tourism panels and generally contributed our bit to help grow the local tourism ecosystem using technology — aside from just offering services. With much better understanding of the space, we have decided to do even more.
In this light, we’re designing a scheme to help train and on-board more charismatic people into Tourism.
A Sour Experience
On the 27th December 2018, just two day after Christmas, everyone on the WeMove team was in the office. I had halted everyone’s holiday & summoned them to the office because one tourism customer who had hired a vehicle for a holiday trip to Ghana was having a terrible experience and we needed to fix it.
She was new in the international trip tourism and hired a bus from us for the Ghana trip. A combination of lack of due diligence from my team and naivety on her part made that trip go south. This cost both our organisation and hers a good amount of money to remedy. For both our businesses, we experienced losses on that day.
We have since learned from that experience and designed processes to make customers’ experience much smoother. But it also showed us how there’s an acute lack of knowledge transfer & ecosystem effect, preventing new tour planners from leveraging the experience of seasoned experts to design great experiences for their customers.
Let’s Train Enthusiasts & Build an Ecosystem
Due to the experience recorded above, leveraging on the relationship we’ve built and insight we’ve acquired, we’re designing a Tourism Technology Bootcamp.
The aim of this is to create a launchpad for people who are interested in tourism to quickly learn as much as they can, using a combination of resources that are readily available online, instructions from experts & executing their first tour with expert guidance.
This is designed to be a paid 8 weeks guided programme, which is mainly going to be held via the internet with one weekly physical discussions sessions involving experts in the industry.
The first 4 weeks will involve online studies & physical meetups. Participants will be exposed to videos & instructions which will introduce them to soft skills, graphics design, social media and branding, tourism calendar scheduling, basic accounting, etc. They will also learn to use WeMove Technologies’ proprietary tools — Planner for planning tours & Rally for tourism distribution. Compulsory discussion meetups will hold once weekly, where experts will share their good & bad experiences along with how they handled them.
The climax of the programme will be the concluding 4 weeks, where participants will be expected to form small groups and plan & execute a tour to any destination of their choice. This will be done under the guidance of an expert & using the WeMove tools that we’ve built to ease this process.
Upon completion of the Bootcamp, participants will be issued with a certificate of completion, to round off the programme.
However, that’s not where it ends. Participants will then graduate into an alumni community, whose main purpose will be to provide guidance for future Bootcamp participants, along with helping WeMove shape the products that we’ll build to support their practice.
Expected Economic Effects
As the number of extremely poor people continues to rise in Nigeria (86.9 million in July 2019), tourism is one of the channels that can be leveraged to create job opportunities for people living anywhere in the country looking to earn a living.
There are so many impressive places within Nigeria that Nigerians haven’t visited, so many interesting stories yet to be told & so many festivals yet to be experienced. There’s at least one tourism attraction in all the 36 states of the federation, so there’s always something to see.
The longterm cumulative effects of this include
- Employment growth: This will be achieved by stimulating growth in the number of local tour planners. From Q3–2020, we plan on training at least 500 people every quarter. That’s 2,500 annually. Resulting to 250,000 direct jobs of tour planners within the next 10 years & millions of indirect jobs for other supporting sectors.
- Healthier inter-tribal relationships: As more people get to visit & understand cultures outside of theirs they learn how to be better accommodating of their country people from other tribes.
- Infrastructural development: We anticipate that, in order to attract more tourism to their states & improve spending there, different state governments will pay proper attention to improving their state’s tourism attraction sites. Hence building the right infrastructure for everything to thrive.
- Increase in GDP & proper distribution of wealth: As people who live & work in the cities visit tourism attraction in remote areas, they patronise their businesses and spend more money there.
I like this, how can I take part?
If you’re interested in participating, please fill out the form below:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSde7JWmS1OPK7OwT3q8JcKCg7IS5a_PZV845xiyWy52gNEM-g/viewform
The participation fee is ₦50,000. This includes costs for the curriculum and discussion sessions (including mentor’s time & visits), along with 1 year free access to WeMove Planner.
Why are we charging for the Bootcamp? The answer is simple — so that participants can value in the process better.
As soon as you pay & join the Bootcamp you will immediately be activated into the WeMove Planner Affiliate Network where you can start earning money immediately, by reselling already existing tours. Also, after planning & executing your tour at the end of the Bootcamp, you will very easily recoup your sign up fee, if you are serious.
If you want to make any enquiries, send an email to hello@wemove.co & someone from the team will get back to you ASAP.
