Tourism businesses broaden their knowledge of growing online platform ParrAPI |04 July 2022
In its continuous efforts to promote Seychelles and enhance its presence online, Tourism Seychelles and its partner, Seychelles Hospitality Tourism Association (SHTA), hosted a social media and ParrAPI training at the Botanical House on Monday, June 27.
Present at the workshop were five tourism businesses, consisting of small establishments, travel agents, tour guides, and restaurants & bars, among other businesses.
Also in attendance was Louise Testa from SHTA, alongside the Tourism Seychelles digital marketing team, namely, Nadine Shah, Melissa Houareau, Rick Samy, and Rodney Esparon.
Aside from enlightening partners on the latest social media trends, the training also broadened their awareness of the benefits of ParrAPI for their businesses and provided the participants with the expertise in registering on the platform and creating their listings.
Speaking at the event, the director-general for destination marketing, Bernadette Willemin, mentioned that the workshop is the first of a series aiming at engaging the interest of industry partners to keep a consistent online presence.
“It is our mission to make Seychelles bigger and brighter across all platforms. Marketing remains a dynamic field, and we have seen over the past two years that digital is the way forward. Therefore, we are committing our resources in terms of manpower and finances to keep our partners in the industry ‘au fait’ with the latest trends,” said Mrs Willemin.
She further commended the SHTA and Digital Marketing representatives for their support and excellent work.
Tourism Seychelles and the SHTA plan on organising more workshops of this nature on Mahé, Praslin and La Digue.
In addition to these workshops, the Tourism department will soon be offering an Open Day service twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, on the three main islands, to continue promoting the ParrAPI platform.
ParrAPI is a free platform for tourism-related businesses where users can add their information such as description, location, pictures, website and booking links, contact details, price, etc. Users may create various product listings depending on what services and products they can offer to the leisure tourist. For example, a hotel can create one listing for the accommodation property, another for its food & beverage outlets, spa services, etc. Once the user adds a listing on the platform, it goes through a quality assurance process by the Tourism department and will then automatically appear on the official destination website for the Seychelles islands: www.seychelles.com.
The official destination website is one of the main websites tourists visit when planning a holiday to Seychelles. Therefore, this will provide tourism-related businesses with a free marketing platform and help local businesses gain more online visibility by featuring on the destination website.
Press release from Tourism Seychelles