With 800 entries received, Discover Africa is the only company in the travel industry to win an award that handled its entire project concept, planning and execution with an in-house marketing and web development team.
"We never thought of building HerdTracker to win any awards. Our main focus wasn't even to build a microsite. When we started developing HerdTracker, the goal was to create a useful tool for everybody out there interested in tracking the annual wildebeest migration. With that in mind, our little internal team only had one mandate - make it for the people." says Van Schalkwyk.
HerdTracker is a real-time Google map that shows instant updates of the migration's progress on its annual, 2,000 kilometre journey between Tanzania and Kenya. Weekly updates are fed into HerdTracker from an army of correspondents across the Serengeti and Masai Mara reserve. Contributors include pilots, safari guides, national park rangers and lodge managers.
The migration map also allows those planning a safari to see a month-by-month prediction, ensuring safari travellers are in the right place at the right time.
The small, six-person team that produced the app, couldn't be happier that it featured in the awards. "It's a huge honour to receive an award for HerdTracker. We didn't intend to go up against the giants, we didn't intend to play the game that an agency plays because we know we didn't have the manpower, and we know we didn't have the budget, but still we managed to get up there and play with the big boys. So for us, winning bronze in the Best Microsite category is as much a surprise and delight as it is for the people who now know there's a tool out there they can use to track the wildebeest migration." says Discover Africa's Head of Digital, Renier van Schalkwyk.
To follow up the world's first app to track Africa's great migration, this month Discover Africa is set to launch yet another useful web-based app that's the first of its kind. The internal team has been hard at work creating a tool that will help travellers in the early stages of African safari holiday planning.
