With the Covid-19 pandemic, African tourist countries are going through a deep crisis. Tunisia, Morocco, South Africa and Senegal have seen international customers disappear and local economies hit hard. A new sector may restore the taste for travel: e-tourism, an interactive virtual visitor experience. A young start, Maghreb Experience, thus offers to discover mythical places in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in interactive immersion.
“E-travel is a new format for experiences, online, live and completely immersive, halfway between live reporting and script travel,” explains Anouar Hacheman, founder of Maghreb experience, the first travel platform. He suggests visiting, for example, the Kasbah in Algiers, Ksar Aït Ben Haddou in Ouarzazate or the Tunisian medina without leaving his chair, but live, connected via a digital platform to local guides and artists who take care of e-tourists.
“You visit this space live, with guides. You meet them, you meet artists, musicians, painters, creative entrepreneurs and other people who bring this space to life. And we wrote down the experience so that it could be as interactive and immersive as possible, ”explains Anouar HacheMan.
Artists, craftsmen or historians participate in the experience. Lydia Haddag is an art historian at CNRS, and she tells better than anyone about the rich hours in the mythical Kasbah in Algiers. “So, we start from the citadel, we visit some palaces, a terrace and we rush down into the city to get as far as the harbor and the Admiralty, where we have a presentation of the pier in Algiers which was a place for socializing for painters. This Kasbah has inspired many artists and we try to pay tribute to it through these online visits. ”
Senegalese, Cameroonian and Congolese destinations soon How will e-travel replace tourism? Georges Panayotis, founder of the consulting company MKG, is not yet convinced of a direct relationship with consumers or future consumers. But one cannot replace the other, he says.
Anouar Hacheman believes that e-travel can find a place in the sun, and especially in the African sun. It is working to soon offer Senegalese, Cameroonian and Congolese destinations.
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