Send Your Facebook Profile on Holiday to Cape Town

Cape Town in South Africa is expecting a massive influx of extra visitors in the next three months without many of them actually going there. How come? These will be virtual visitors experiencing the Cape via a world-first Facebook-based travel app.

This could be you virtually in Cape Town

The Facebook app is the idea of Cape Town Tourism and its agencies Ogilvy Cape Town and Flow Communications.

Cape Town has won numerous accolades over the past year, including most recently a Top Beach Destination award at 2012 World Travel Awards in September. The Facebook app and campaign is part of the Cape Town Tourism strategy to keep Cape Town top of mind as a destination, and social media is a core part of this.

According to Cape Town Tourism CEO, Mariëtte du Toit-Helmbold, they are acutely aware of the importance of social media in travel decisions, and in particular, the role that Facebook plays in determining holiday destinations.

“From 02 October, until the end of December 2012, Facebook users around the world will be able to send their Facebook profile on a holiday to Cape Town and stand the chance of winning a trip to the city for real,” she says.

“Anyone signing their profile up for a trip gets a boarding pass in their profile’s name from their home town and heads off on a five day virtual trip to Cape Town. Each day they receive an update with photos of where their profile ate, went, partied or stayed – with gripping point-of-view photos and videos showing the full experience,” says du Toit-Helmbold.

Virgin Atlantic is sponsoring the flights for the winners of the trip to Cape Town, and will resume their seasonal direct dailies between London and Cape Town from 18 October 2012.

Research in 2012 has shown that 76% of travellers post vacation photos to a social network and 40% post activity/attraction reviews. When you bear in mind that over 90% of consumers around the world say they trust recommendations from friends, such as word-of-mouth, and that of those who used social media to research travel plans, only 48% stuck with their original travel plans; it is clear that social media is now of paramount importance for travel authorities.

Cape Town Tourism’s recent iAmbassador campaign – during which influential travel bloggers were hosted in Cape Town and local citizens engaged as the marketers of Cape Town – resulted in over 36 million Twitter impressions in three weeks (source: Tweetreach).

It’s a simple process to sign up to play the Facebook game. Facebook users need to click on the app to start their journey on the www.mycapetownholiday.com Facebook page.

Totsiens, as they say!

Website: http://www.capetown.travel/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CapeTown.Travel

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/CapeTownTourism

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/CapeTownTourism

We were interested to try this app out as we make Facebook apps here at Shinesquad – we release our location- based Facebook Pet App next week – standby.