South African Tourism has signed a creative partnership deal with TripAdvisor®, taking advantage of the world’s largest and most popular travel community’s content to promote South Africa as a diverse and exciting tourist destination for 2010.

The fully integrated campaign - the Ultimate Experience hub - offers South African Tourism a unique opportunity to engage with the TripAdvisor community, providing travellers with a dynamic blend of SA Tourism and TripAdvisor content giving the user comprehensive travel information to help plan their perfect trip.

http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/SouthAfricaExperience-c1-AdventureWildlife

As the country prepares itself to be the focus of this year’s World Cup, SA Tourism is keen to promote itself as a destination with far more on offer than just football. The TripAdvisor campaign, a six figure deal, has been developed to educate all types of travellers about the range of experiences on offer. The markets targeted by the campaign are UK, US, AU, FR, IT, DE, NL on TripAdvisor’s English sites.

The Ultimate Experience hub focuses on three key themes; Adventure and Wildlife, Culture and Nature and Entertainment and Leisure. Each tab will feature TripAdvisor’s top rated attractions, as reviewed by real travellers, photos, videos and exciting content about South Africa.

Helena Egan, Destination Marketing Sales Manager for TripAdvisor comments, “We’re thrilled South African Tourism recognises the value of TripAdvisor’s user generated content. This integrated campaign will allow travellers considering a trip to South Africa to benefit from user reviews and ratings from the world’s largest and most popular travel community.”

Roshene Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at SA Tourism comments, “We know that the majority of our target segments use the online environment for researching and gathering information about holiday destinations, so we believe that this partnership with TripAdvisor will further complement our strategy to market South Africa globally.”

The campaign includes targeted co-branded banners throughout the TripAdvisor site driving travellers directly to the tabs and experiences most relevant to them, as well as to South Africa’s WOM and travel agent booking sites. The partnership also includes the integration of a TripAdvisor review widget on the accommodation pages of the South African Tourism site.

Roshene Singh continues, “The TripAdvisor partnership offers travellers the opportunity to engage with our destination in an interactive manner and to place South Africa at the forefront of conversations that are taking place online.”