Gimme: A local tour de force

It’s no secret that smart tourists seek authenticity. But how difficult is it to find?

Tour2.0 is a home-grown online platform for promoting real-world, local tourism. It looks for unique, cultural and community-rooted tourism for those "looking for authentic experiences", founder and CEO Daniel Adidwa tells the Financial Mail.

It’s a trendy, kind-of "glocalisation" approach to the question of how you widen the reach of tourism spend.

Tour2.0 is a booking or exposure platform. It finds (or is found by) tourism service providers, lists what’s on offer, and makes a small mark-up on the price (of the service itself, no booking fee) by directing tourists to service providers.

What gives it the edge, in my view, is its vetting service. It will confirm not just the service, but that the guides, for example, are local and knowledgeable, covering the well-trodden hot spots and some lesser-known haunts or "hidden gems". Another feather in its cap is its focus on careful, positive community impact experiences (tours that include local businesses, musicians and artisans, for example), and that it specifically steers away from exploitative tourism practices.

In the pursuit of these lofty ideals, Tour2.0 occasionally blurs the line between platform and provider, with some of the experiences on offer "created and curated" by the company itself.

So, what’s on offer? You could book a two-hour tour of Newtown and downtown Jo’burg for about R500, or even five days, four nights of wide-ranging activities and accommodation in Cape Town from R4,448 per person.

The Tour2.0 site is extremely well put-together, and the tours look exciting and interesting, and are thoughtfully selected. I will definitely be directing my international guests in its direction, and may even venture out for a bit of local tourism myself.

Tour2.0
Cool factor: *****
Usability: *****