From Experience Kano to Experience Ibom: Building marketable tourism products across Nigeria

By Jimoh Babatunde Nigeria’s tourism potential has often been discussed in terms of its rich cultural heritage, historical landmarks, natural attractions and hospitality offerings. Yet, despite these enormous assets, the country continues to grapple with a fundamental challenge: converting tourism attractions into organised, marketable products capable of attracting visitors, generating revenue and creating sustainable economic opportunities.

For Elizabeth Agboola, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NTT Global Destinations (NGD), bridging this gap is at the heart of destination development. Her approach is built on the understanding that tourism development goes beyond identifying attractive places or promoting destinations. It requires packaging experiences, understanding visitor markets, developing commercial models and creating effective channels through which tourism products can reach customers.

This philosophy informed her work on the Experience Kano destination concept and subsequently her early consultancy engagement in the development of Experience Ibom in Akwa Ibom State. Although the two initiatives emerged from different destination environments, they reflected a shared ambition: repositioning Nigerian destinations from places with tourism potential into organised tourism markets with clearly defined products and identifiable customers.

From Experience Kano to Experience Ibom Experience Kano was conceived around the opportunity to package Kano’s distinctive cultural heritage, history, commercial activities, hospitality and lifestyle into organised experiences that could appeal to different categories of visitors. The thinking behind the initiative recognised that destinations cannot effectively market themselves to every visitor in the same way.

Business travellers, cultural tourists, domestic holidaymakers, families and international visitors have different interests, expectations and spending capacities. Understanding these differences is central to developing tourism products that are attractive to specific markets. Building on this approach, Agboola was subsequently engaged to provide consultancy support for the initial conceptual development of Experience Ibom, a destination management concept designed to package and promote the tourism offerings of Akwa Ibom State.

Her assignment focused on the early conceptualisation, product definition and market positioning of the proposed destination business. The consultancy engagement, however, ended in less than two months, before the broader development and implementation programme could be completed. The initial concept was handed over to the business owner, who retained responsibility for its subsequent development, investment, operations and expansion.

Experience Ibom has since continued its development under the leadership of Nkereuwem Onung and the Remlords Group. For Agboola, the experience illustrates an important distinction in tourism enterprise development: conceiving and defining a destination product is one stage, while financing, implementing, operating and expanding the business requires a different set of resources, partnerships and management capabilities.

Beyond Tourism Promotion: The Business of Destination Development According to Agboola, one of the major weaknesses in Nigeria’s tourism development approach is the tendency to concentrate heavily on destination promotion without giving sufficient attention to the commercial structure of the products being promoted. She believes that having beautiful landscapes, historical sites, cultural festivals and hospitality facilities does not automatically translate into a functioning tourism economy.

“Many Nigerian states have extraordinary tourism assets, but having attractions does not automatically mean having a tourism product. Someone must define what is being sold, who will buy it, how it will be delivered, what experience the customer should expect and how revenue will be generated. “That is the part of tourism development I am particularly interested in.

I enjoy taking a destination that may already have cultural, historical or natural advantages and translating those advantages into products that can be positioned, packaged, distributed and sold.” This approach places product development at the centre of destination management. It involves identifying marketable tourism assets, determining the most appropriate visitor segments, designing experiences around their interests, identifying service providers and establishing distribution channels through which prospective visitors can access and purchase the products.

In practical terms, it means moving from simply telling potential tourists what a destination has to offer to presenting them with experiences they can understand, book and pay for. Building Destination Economies, Not Just Destination Brands Through NTT Global Destinations, Agboola is seeking to advance a broader destination economy model that connects tourism product