YourAfricanSafari.com (YAS), a new travel site for planning an African safari, has been welcomed by tour operators and is seen as a useful platform, particularly for smaller operators to market their offerings.
YAS describes itself as a platform specifically for African tour operators to showcase their core strengths and most popular safari itineraries. Visitors who are unsure of where to book can do searches on safari itineraries, short-list tour companies, submit safari quote requests, find out information on safari countries and share the safari experience via social media as well as post reviews.
Onne Vegter, Director of Wild Wings Safari, which already has its company information posted on YAS said: “For clients who come across this website and want to compare various operators, this will be a valuable resource. If they manage to grow into an authoritative site with good traffic, it will certainly benefit our company.”
Annalize Grimbeek from MAG Tours and Safaris, said the website was a great way for tour operators to interact with each other and to view and make use of itineraries offered by competitors. “It’s nice to have one site where we can actually use each other and benefit from each other.”
Colin Fryer from Centre Stage Travel, said his company would make use of such a website as it accumulated the expertise of many tour operators within sub-Saharan Africa.
For Fryer, YAS is a way of enhancing the research his company does for clients wanting to book safaris, although he worries that it could be too vast a collection. “A plethora of operators, destinations and options may well deter a newcomer to our land by the sheer size of their offering.”
He noted that another challenge might be that potential clients might just use it for information gathering then go directly to the product, property and/or destination themselves.
Vegter also says the platform would be improved by better integration with existing review sites. When comparing YAS to sites such as TripAdvisor, Facebook or SafariBookings.com, Vegter said his concern was that the proliferation of review platforms meant that an operator’s reviews were spread across a variety of websites.
“When a client wants to leave a review, they want to do this in one place, not on many different websites,” Vegter said. “On some of these platforms, we already have hundreds of positive reviews, while on Your African Safari we currently have no reviews yet, which creates the impression of a new and untested company, when in fact it is Your African Safari and our listing there that is new.”
He said a solution would be to find a way of aggregating all the online reviews for a specific operator on one platform. “It is not realistic for small companies to maintain and promote their listing and client reviews on so many different review sites.”
