South African Tourism has launched a brand new social media initiative to help agents to effectively sell the country. Each video will focus on one region of the country with a special guest offering top tips on the best experiences for holidaymakers.

Qantas has launched Qantas Concierge, a Facebook Messenger bot that gives customers in the United Kingdom personalised travel inspiration.

Cheapflights has launched Cheapflights Chat, an interactive bot utilising Facebook’s new Chat SDK. The proprietary technology will enable the social network’s massive global community to use its popular Messenger platform to search for flights and other travel-related information, before linking them to the Cheapflights website where they can continue to search or move off on to the next stage of the booking process.

TripAdvisor has announced a new app that gives hospitality business owners a quick and easy way to enhance their Facebook Pages with reviews, awards and other TripAdvisor content. The TripAdvisor App for Facebook, which is available immediately, is designed to help businesses attract more guests with traveller feedback and is an expansion of the popular TripAdvisor widgets.

Cape Town in South Africa is expecting a massive influx of extra visitors in the next three months without many of them actually going to the city in real life (as yet). These will be virtual visitors experiencing the delights of the Cape via a world-first Facebook-based travel app.

Berlin has just cracked the 1.5 million mark on Facebook.