If all goes according to plan, the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror will be publishing the first comprehensive Vhembe Tourism Guide in next week's paper. The 16-page A4-size booklet promises to be the ideal guide that can be used as a reference to do some holiday planning or simply to find out which tourism treasures are in the region.
According to Anton van Zyl, manager of Zoutnet Publishers, the need to have a comprehensive guide of tourism facilities in the area is long overdue. "We are situated in an incredibly beautiful part of the country, and yet our own residents know very little about what is available," says Van Zyl.
Van Zyl blamed part of this on the local tourism industry, that only seemed to market their facilities to potential tourists from outside the area. "They seem to forget that the market here serves as valuable referrals for when people come and visit," he explains. "I recently spoke to an owner of a guest house, who told me that he only uses online booking agents, and he gets a fair amount of business via the Internet. But he also told me that most of his business comes via local referrals. Yet he never advertises locally or does anything to promote his business in the local market," says Van Zyl.
Van Zyl believes that the Vhembe District can only become a major tourist attraction if all the residents do their bit to market the region. "The industry has the potential to create many more job opportunities," he says. "But that will entail that we grow that market. We all need to do our bit by visiting as many of the tourist attractions as possible, so that we can tell others about it."
The Vhembe Tourism Guide contains details of more than 232 tourism facilities. The listing includes guest houses, game farms, restaurants and hotels. "As far as possible, we tried to verify that all of these facilities are still operating and are worthy of a referral," says Van Zyl. He explained that one of the big problems people experienced with the Internet was that it often tended to be dominated by fly-by-night institutions. "If you know the local market fairly well, you get scared to see what pops up when you do a Google search," he adds.
The listings in the Vhembe Tourism Guide are all free of charge to bona fide tourism facilities. "For those businesses that wanted more exposure, such as pictures and elaborative descriptions, we offered advertising space," he says. The idea, however, was to compile a guide where every tourist facility is mentioned, whether they cared about advertising or not. "It needs to be a valuable referral tool for our readers," says Van Zyl.
The plan is also to publish another tourism guide before the end of the year. "We realise that we might not have included everyone. There may be new businesses that have opened or we simply did not know about places. The idea is that this must be a dynamic guide that can be updated every couple of months," says Van Zyl.
Be sure not to miss out on next week's edition and get your copy of the Vhembe Tourism Guide. The tourism guide will also be available on the websites of the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror.