Tanzania to Get Tourist Portal

Dar es Salaam — Tanzania is designing a destination portal which will be used as a gateway for tourists who intend to sample the various attractions around the country.

The portal is being funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The Destination Portal's Project Manager, Rossan Mduma told East African Business Week in Dar es Salaam recently, the portal will take six months to be completed.

"This destination portal will be designed in a way that would enable tourists to pay their dues direct through our local banks instead of paying separately to tour guides or to the hotel which he/she will be accommodated as it used to be," Mduma said.

Mduma said the reason behind the new move comes as a response to stakeholders who have been complaining that the Tanzania Tourist Board website lacks some local content with regard to tourist's attractions.

He said the main reason of designing the destination portal is to collect all related information about tourist attractions in the country.

"We came to realize there is a number of tourist attractions that have not being aired for years, so we want them to be known around the world and hence to increase number of tourists in the country," he said.

He said they aim to design a portal which will touch every corner of Tanzania and exposes all available attractions for tourists.

"The destination portal will be like a gateway to our visitors and will also include all reliable information with regard to tourism and nature of payment when you are here (Tanzania) or outside the country," he said.

He told East African Business Week the said information will also help to direct visitors where to go once he landed at the airport to where he intended to go.

He said the information that will be available on the portal include where to find hotels, historical sites, emergency services, financial services, diving centers, local transport and its costs, national parks among others.

"We want to create special domain that will be fitted in our websites and some social media such as Facebook, twitter among others, he said, adding that we want to make it a focal point for our visitors."

According to him, the domain of the portal will be fixed on the Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and all other means of promotion campaigns.

He said he has partner with stakeholders who will be assigned to move all around the regions and gather all information related to hospitality industry.

"We have divided this country in eight zones and we will be going on these zones in phases, he said. The zones are southern highland, real south, western, central, northern, Zanzibar and lake zones.

In this first phase, which is a pilot study, we went to real south zone which comprises Lindi, Mtwara and Mafia and in the lake zone which include Mwanza, Sinyanga, Mara, Gita and Simiyu," he said.

In the second phase, the group will go to the southern highland and northern zones.

Commenting on the first phase, he said it was successful, because they found over 171 attractions and most of them were not known previously.

He said in Mafia alone they found about 44 sites, Lindi (28), Masasi (23), Nachingwea (14) and Liwale (18) as in the lake zone they found 35 sites which in Bukoba there were 12 and Ukerewe there were four to mention a few.

When asked how they are going to popularize the portal he said, "We will first create awareness to tour guides and other stakeholders in the tourism industry in the country."

"Once we done locally, we will move outside and use varieties of media outlets such as TVs, Radios, Publications, social media among others," he pointed out.

For last year, Tanzania has attracted over 1 million tourists which enabled the country to generate about $1.85 billion more compared the year before which generated a total $1.71 billion.

According to him the availability of this destination portal will accelerate the growth of the tourism industry and increase foreign exchange earnings for the country.