Despite what people think, working in the travel industry doesn’t mean you get to spend half the year travelling around the world visiting the destinations you sell. However, familiarisation trips are run from time to time by tour operators and tourist boards to their destinations.
Recently, I started to marketing Southern Africa as part of my business and as part of the process of building my knowledge of the place, I took the South African Fundi Tourism Expert course. This course is run by the South African tourist board and has specifically designed to enable the travel provider (in this case, Explorer Travel) to market South Africa as a destination more effectively.
Since I passed the course, I have received an email from the South African tourist board, offering me a place on their 2008 Familiarisation trip to South Africa. Naturally, I was delighted and accepted immediately and I will be heading down to South Africa for a week sometime in June.
I’m still waiting for the itinerary – it was delayed as the airline we were due to fly with ceased operating and arrangements have since been made to fly with British Airways. The details are being finalised and I should have the itinerary in the next few days. South Africa is a huge, diverse country so there is no way I’ll get to see everything. What I do know is that I’ll be very busy both in South Africa and when I get back. I’ll have a load of pictures to upload and my website will also need to be updated
Big Five Explorer (South Africa) - http://www.big5.explorertravel.co.uk/Destinations/southafrica.htm
