The Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA) Gideon Aryeequaye has hinted of plans by his outfit to embark on aggressive marketing of Ghana’s tourism to the rest of the world.
The aim is to sell destination Ghana to travelers across the world as the most preferred country for tourism and also attract investment into the travel and hospitality space.
Mr. Aryeequaye who identifies marketing as a key component in this regard made this known at the sidelines of the ongoing World Travel Market (WTM) in London.
According to him, the country has a lot to offer that the world must come to see and that is why projecting Ghana is very critical to developing the tourism sector.
‘’ Comparatively, if you want to be fair I can confidently say and it’s not as if I’m coming from Ghana that’s why I am talking that way, but I can confidently say that Ghana has a lot more than these our country friends that we know. Indeed they may also have something but we have a lot more to project so you’d agree with me that we need to do a lot of marketing to try and unearth what we have and that’s exactly what we are trying to do.
Tourism is tourism, education, whatever, it is said that even filth is tourism because elsewhere people project filth and then people want to go and see the kind of filth that is there and people pay money to airlines, hotels, eateries, and so on, so there is a lot to project.
We have heritage, we have too much to sleep over it so indeed WTM is an opener and we coming to project Ghana, market Ghana as much we can and it’s my hope that subsequently our industry players from the private sector will also be participating to make sure that in our own small way, we can all sell Ghana collectively,’’ he said.
He mentioned for example that Ghana has renewed its agreement with CNN to run ad on the network from next year: ‘’Nine years ago, we started something with CNN, it’s capital intensive, you need to look for the money to get it done but you also agree that once it is done, it projects you because Cable News Network is across the world and everybody knows it’s a very wide platform and for you to run a 60-second ad on it is a plus to you. And so we’ve negotiated and thankfully by next year we going to have something to do with CNN.’’
Part of the CEO’s plans is to explore the possibility of placing adverts at the various stadia where EPL matches are played; a strategy he’s hopeful would give many more fans and viewers across globe the opportunity to know more about the country’s tourism offerings.
He also indicated that he intends to make the country digitally accessible to all with the launch of a platform that allows everyone to explore the country online.
Most people come to you and they want to learn more, we looking at establishing the single window platform where once you log on to it, it takes you every were you want to go, at the click of a button, right from the comfort of your own home, your office, phone, wherever you can surf through and get to know everything that Ghana is doing,’’ he stated.
Ghana over the years has continued to participate in international fairs and tourism-related events in key source markets such as the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.
The London event presents one of the biggest platforms for the country to present among many others, its diverse and rich cultural heritage which is an important constituent of its vast tourism offerings.
And for Mr. Aryeequaye, this year’s WTM has been very impressive, ‘’ if you look at the attendance and see where Africa is, where the rest of the world are, if you look at the setting, if you look at the placement of the various countries you can tell that this is an improvement over the previous ones.
To talk of Ghana on its own, this is the first time we have had a lot of our stakeholders to participate in this.
We looked at engaging them the more, bringing them from the hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, airlines and so on.
We looked at bringing them together to market what we have in Ghana and ‘for the first time in many years, we’ve been able to achieve this.’’
Ghana’s delegation to this year’s World Travel Market is led by the Chief Director at the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative and Creative Arts, Nana Oduro Kwarteng and with him are Mr. Akunu Dake, Board Chairman of GTA, Mr. Gideon Aryeequaye, CEO of GTA, Miss Tourism Ghana, Tourism Ambassador Abeiku Santana, officials from both the Ministry and its agency, private sector and some stakeholders within the tourism, culture and creative arts industry.
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Source: Ghana Tourism Authority
