Selling Travel to Africa: The Geography Challenge

PHOTO: Cape Town, pictured here, is more than 2,000 miles from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But if you buy into the little world news the mass media feeds us, you'd think that both regions have the same violent problems. (photo by David Cogswell)

It may be true that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But what happens anywhere in Africa immediately spreads out and subsumes the entire continent, making it a fearsome place to be. At least that is what some travelers seem to think.

According to a recent Associated Press news story, “Assailants armed with sticks, pieces of wood and firearms attacked the state television station, the airport and the main military base in Congo's capital in what appeared to be a coup attempt early Monday, before being repelled by the country's military, officials and witnesses said.”

Tour operators and travel agents who sell Africa who came across the story must have cringed.

“We get questions anytime anything like this happens,” says Dan Austin, president of Austin Adventures, which operates safaris in Africa, including one in the Republic of the Congo.

An incident in one part of the continent seems to reverberate endlessly across the continent in the minds of would-be travelers to Africa.

Travelers planning to go to South Africa or Kenya may decide not to go because of the article on violence in the Congo even though Kinshasha, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is more than 2,000 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, about the distance from Los Angeles to Cleveland.

Kinshasha is 1,454 miles from Nairobi, Kenya, about the distance from New York to Houston. It’s almost as far as from London to Moscow (1,555 miles).

Africa is so huge it is hard to get your mind around it. For perspective, at 11.67 million square miles Africa is as large as the U.S. (3.79 million square miles), China (3.70 million square miles) and most of Europe combined, as this infographic illustrates.

But from the U.S. perspective, it’s all so far away it often gets all lumped together.

This is not only a reflection of the geographic unfamiliarity with Africa of the mass of individual American travelers. The problem is exacerbated by vague news reports in our soundbite-driven media.

When a major news source such as ABC reports on separate incidents in the Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic and groups them all together under one name, saying, “Africa Sees Violent, Deadly Start to 2014,” it doesn’t promote understanding.

This is one of the ongoing, daily concerns of providers of travel services to Africa. Americans as a whole know very little about it and lump it all together. And media reports in general do little to sort through the confusion.  

Most of the mainstream news reports on the incident in the Congo did not even bother to specify what country they were actually referring to.

There are two countries called the Congo. One is the Republic of the Congo (sometimes identified by its capital as “Congo-Brazzaville”) and there is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasha). That confusion could spell trouble when either name appears in the news. The referenced incident took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Kinshasha.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is especially significant because it is the second largest nation in Africa, sprawling across central Africa almost from coast to coast. At more than 900,000 square miles, it is the 11th largest country in the world, a quarter the size of the U.S. itself.

If you superimposed it over a map of the United States, it would stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior and from Wisconsin to California. An incident that takes place in one part of the country could be a thousand miles from another part of the country.

“I think our job as both tour operators and eventually sales people is to simply do the best job we can to be aware and turn that into education,” says Austin. “Prior to launching our new Congo program (Republic of Congo), I had no idea there were two, two with similar names and history.

"The difference is one is now considered safe and stable and the other not so. What is actually ironic is the one with the word ‘democratic’ it its name is the one with the most challenges and civil unrest.”

David Herbert, chief experiential officer of Great Safaris, says that travel agents and tour operators will have to live with this problem “until geography becomes a high school subject. Even travel professionals have some difficulty with South America and South Africa.”

And if you’re waiting for that to happen, you’ll be waiting a long time. Meanwhile, if you are in the business of selling travel to Africa, your job is cut out for you.

Virginia Haynes, a public relations specialist specializing in Africa, says, “This is the kind of thing we struggle with all the time. But I don’t know what the answer is. I find that a lot of consumers think Africa is a country, not a continent with more than 50 countries. It certainly seems to be true that if there is a problem in Kenya, people thinking of going to South Africa have second thoughts even though they are not even close.  We are geographically challenged as a country for sure.”

Haynes agrees that the trade must take on the role of education. “All African countries need to do a better job of promoting themselves as separate entities,” she says, “but that takes money and that is another problem as there is very little.  And they need to do a better job of getting along with each other within each country!  The day of tribes is over.”

The misunderstanding of African geography is the cross the African travel industry must bear in trying to sell to the American market.

But there is a positive side to that. It is also what defines their profession and gives them a job. If you are in the business of selling African travel, you are in the teaching profession. That is your job. And the degree to which you succeed in your mission, your income will grow.

Follow me on Twitter @CogswellTravelP.