Cape Town - Reed Travel Exhibitions (RTE), organisers of the World Travel Market (WTM), has announced its intention to expand this flagship event into the African continent with the launch of World Travel Market Africa. This two day event will be held at Cape Towns International Convention Centre (CTICC) on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 May 2014.

It aims to emulate the success of sister events, WTM (which has taken place in London for the past 53 years), and WTM Latin America. Forming part of Africa Travel Week, WTM Africa will be one of three co-located Reed Exhibitions events during the week of April 28 to May 3 2014.

Africa Travel Week will target Africas inbound and outbound markets under RTEs established portfolio brands of WTM (World Travel Market), ILTM (International Luxury Travel Market) and IBTM (Incentives, Business Travel & Meetings). As the finale of Africa Travel Week, WTM Africa will showcase a wide range of tourism products from pan African and international exhibitors and will attract a broad audience of local, pan African and international visitors from all tourism sectors focusing on both inbound and outbound travel markets.

In addition to this, an insightful and topical Africa-focused education programme, brought together by key industry figures, will run during the two days of the event.

It will cover topics such as responsible tourism, including the business benefits of sustainable tourism, education within the African tourism industry, blogging and how businesses can successfully work with travel bloggers, travel technology and the latest trends in the region.

The Hosted Buyer Programme will bring in 300 high-profile buyers from across the globe looking to source products and services from the WTM Africa exhibitors.

According to Kate Shepherd, marketing manager of WTM Africa, there is a huge interest in the tourism industry in emerging markets like Africa due to the growing middle class on the continent.

"Our vision is clear: We want to deliver the best business contacts and we are able to do this due to our international profile," Polly Magraw, exhibition manager of WTM Africa told Fin24.

"We are not trying to replicate the Tourism Indaba in Durban. We do not have a political agenda and our exhibition is open to the whole industry."

She said WTM Africa offers added leverage because of the global spread of RTE's events.

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Pan African travel market launched