Tourism technology boot camp week 4 :Recap.
The past week signified the end of the online courses and physical meet up sessions. The week was of course heralded by study materials on community building, basic accounting and lastly, processing travel documents. As is custom, we had established professionals over to take on the aforementioned courses for the benefit of our participants.
For our first facilitator, we had the remarkable Sam Adeleke. Sam leads the Nigerian chapter of Travel Massive Global, the world’s largest community of travel and tourism professionals. He is also a cofounder at TravelCentre.Africa and TravelWithSam, both tourism companies which incorporate tech with the goal of providing personalized vacation experiences. He has worked with government agencies like South African Tourism, Rwanda Development Board, Lagos Tourism, Akwaaba Travel Market, Kenya Tourism Board, Uganda Tourism Board, Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) and even Ogun State Tourism on destination marketing campaigns. He is also adept at community building and deploying said community to drive growth and profitability.
We had Sam on Saturday to impart his vast knowledge in our students. As tour operators, it’s imperative that you build a community than helps launch and sustain your momentum. Communities encourage relationships not just with you and your customers, but within them as well. It also fosters a sense of kinship and loyalty. It is valuable to every business owner and Sam made sure to transmit this skill to our students.
Our second facilitator, Niyi Adegboye is the head of growth and partnership at Accounteer. Accounteer is a cloud accounting platform for small businesses where they can create invoicing, trail expenses and follow up on their finances. At Accounteer, Niyi drives the steady growth of the company with his strategies and tactics. He is also a skilled business developer, tech-enthusiast and a mentor at Global Startup Ecosystem. Niyi was present to lecture our students on basic book keeping and accounting.
As business owners, we cannot afford to be lax about our finances. We have to dutifully track expenses and be able to balance our books as at when due. Niyi’s session was very insightful and shed light on easy ways entrepreneurs can follow through in their finances.
Our last facilitator for the maiden edition of the tourism technology boot camp Lagos happened to be Hafees Keshinro. Hafees is a travel expert and eco-tourism aficionado, with travel trails across UK, US, Finland, Portugal, Dubai, South Africa, Ghana, Benin Republic, among others. He is the founder of Butterfly Tourism Nigeria, a hybrid travel management company. As an avid writer, his works have been published extensively across Nigerian media ThisDay and Punch. He has also graced media houses like Bond FM, Wazobia FM and Classic FM on multiple occasions to share insights on key matters bordering on the travel and tourism industry.
He is tagged the King of Luxury Travel and the Emir of Budget Travel.
Processing and securing proper documentation for travel is an uphill but essential task for tour operators and guides. Hafees helped our participants to his depth knowledge and how he has been able to successfully scale this particular hurdle. With his session, the pedagogical aspect of the tourism technology boot camp came to an end.
We will no doubt miss all the insightful information imparted by all our facilitators in the past month but as they say, all good things must come to an end. We are deeply grateful to the teachers for taking out time from their extremely clogged schedules to help raise new tour operators. Their support is deeply appreciated. We now move on to the next phase.
