Last week on the blog I told you about speaking at the World Travel Market, Africa 2024 as part of two panels discussing accessible travel. A few days afterwards I was approached by Tarryn Tomlinson, the leader of one of those panels, asking if I’d be willing to travel to Durban to speak at another similar event, Africa’s Travel Indaba. I jumped at the chance.
The Indaba is Southern Africa’s largest travel convention, with participants from the travel and hospitality industries across Africa and the world. I was told they were expecting 15 000 people this year, including exhibitors, speakers, and visitors. We were invited to speak on the first day, at an industry specific event focusing on trends in the travel and tourism space. Our stream topic was Technological Advancement Fostering Sustainable Transformation.
The session comprised two panel discussions and was facilitated by television personality, Carol Ofori. Carol did an amazing job, overseeing sessions that were filled with information and with several dynamic speakers. She even managed to squeeze in a few questions for each topic, despite time being a real issue.
Our panel was speaking on Exploring Accessible Tourism and the Role of AI in Advancing Inclusion. Once again, Tarryn led the panel, with Jabaar Cassiem Mohamed speaking on travel for the Deaf community and citing an example of how inclusive hiring practises can improve the guest experience. I spoke about the way in which inclusive travel benefits not just people with disabilities but all travellers, and Elly Suverein, from Ximuwu Lodge, spoke about running a fully mobility inclusive safari lodge in Limpopo, South Africa. Her awareness of the challenges faced by mobility impaired travellers came about after her husband broke his leg and found it immensely difficult to find venues that could accommodate his temporary disability.
Then Tarryn and Chris Phillips introduced the audience to AVA, an AI Chat-Bot that Will assist tourism and hospitality service providers to assess the accessibility of their venues for all disabilities and will provide a list of recommended changes to improve their accessibility. Once any changes have been made, they can simply run the assessment again and it will update their report and rating. This will make it significantly easier for service providers to make their offerings more inclusive.
South African technology expert, Arthur Goldstuck, who spoke in the session before ours, chatted to us after our session. He subsequently wrote a highly complementary article about what we had shared for the business Times, part of the Sunday Times national newspaper. We were thrilled to see his interest in AVA and the impact it could have on the travel industry in Africa. The same article was published in a technology website a few days later.
You can read Arthur’s article here: https://gadget.co.za/techtable1/
PS AVA will be launched to the public around July, and I hope to be involved in helping to spread the news and the implementation of this wonderful tool as it progresses. More on my Durban trip next time.
