Everyone knows that Cape Town is the place to be during the summer months, and especially over the festive season. The Mother City buzzes with tourists from around the world, not to mention a large cohort of South Africans who have travelled from around the country to enjoy a well-earned holiday in the fairest Cape.
Flow Communications plays a large role in ensuring that Cape Town’s tourists are well looked after – at least in a digital sense. With several clients in the tourism industry, what is usually referred to as the “silly season” for many businesses is in fact one of our busiest times!
We’ve helped Cape Town Tourism, the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, the Two Oceans Aquarium and even the City of Cape Town’s Cape Town Summer Market ride this wave of increased activity and business in style.
Our social media experts have been involved in getting questions answered, providing useful information, and generating great content for our clients and their customers. We’ve ensured that our clients’ websites are up-to-date and relevant, and helped to engage clients’ customers in meaningful ways. Online ticket sales for the aquarium and the cableway, for example, helped create a smoother experience for their visitors, which in turn means that a satisfied customer is more likely to return again and again.
The Two Oceans Aquarium experienced a 25% increase in online visitors in December compared with the previous year. The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway enjoyed a record December, with nearly 120 000 people hopping on to the fabled cable car for a ride to Table Mountain’s summit. That’s 20 000 people more than in most Decembers. Likewise, the number of online visitors to the cableway’s website saw a very healthy increase over the festive season. The number of visitors rose by more than 25% compared with December 2011.
This is in part due to the exposure gained from the mountain becoming one of the New7Wonders of Nature, which has benefited Cape Town generally too, with increased interest being shown by international users as well as South Africans.
Daily blog updates, dedicated online reputation management and a carefully structured communication strategy have helped us build a loyal following online. The real-time intranet system we built, which allows the cableway to post up-to-the-minute updates on its operating status, weather conditions and length of queues, has also proven to be a very useful tool.
Leanne Pohlmann, project manager at Flow, says: “The cableway has a solid strategy that it has developed with Flow around online content, and a great mix of visual material, specials, and useful, practical information like weather updates and how to buy tickets online. To see this strategy result in such an increase in numbers is encouraging.”