The Bench
The following year, two days before the start of AHIF, terrorists attacked and occupied the Westgate shopping centre, a few minutes’ drive from the conference venue. With some major speakers cancelling their attendance and pre-planned announcements, Tarsh moved into crisis management mode – rapidly organising a press conference with Kenya’s Minister of Tourism, the President of WTTC and Marriott’s top executive in the Middle East and Africa to talk about the tourism industry’s resilience to terrorism and so counterbalance the negative coverage. Tarsh then arranged for one of them to spend the day touring the major TV studios in Nairobi giving live interviews.
To date, Tarsh has handled media for ten AHIFs and the event has become established as the premier hotel investment conference of its type in Africa. The first edition of AHIF in West Africa attracted over a hundred journalists. One edition of AHIF in Rwanda received over 8 hours coverage on CNBC. The last AHIF to take place in Addis Ababa achieved 1,225 online clips, with a reach of 56.3m and advertising equivalent value (AVE) exceeding £500,000, a very substantial multiple of Tarsh’s project fee.
When The Bench first invited Tarsh to handle media relations for the Africa Hotel Investment Forum (AHIF), it was in competition with other similar events in Africa. The ambition was to make AHIF “the go-to event” for investors.
In raising the profile of AHIF, Tarsh engaged with many of the participants in the conference to find news stories and proposed a collaborative approach to publicity, working with top executives, consultants, and data providers to offer fresh insights into the hospitality industry in Africa. An example is joint publicity of W-Hospitality's development pipeline report. Tarsh also undertook its own media research to build a database of authoritative local journalists.
In the first year working with Bench, more than 60 journalists attended AHIF in Nairobi, including Asahi Shimbun (Japan), Associated Press, Bloomberg, CCTV (China), CNBC, Reuters, Xinhua (China) and all the major local newspapers, TV stations and news agencies. Well over a hundred articles appeared, bearing positive messages about the outlook for tourism in Africa.
David Tarsh discusses AHIF on CNBC Africa
Top brands such as Accor, Radisson, Hilton and Marriott now use the event to make major media announcements and, in a rare development, Africa Press (APO) approached Tarsh to request a media partnership, based on the quality of the PR output it had observed. There is now a strategic partnership between AHIF and APO.
Tarsh has also worked for Bench Events on the inaugural Asia Hotel and Tourism Investment Conference (AHTIC) in Sri Lanka, which was considered by all involved to have been a great success after the opening ceremony, attended by the country’s President, was televised live on national TV, co-hosted by a popular local TV news presenter and David Tarsh.
Tarsh has also been engaged to handle media for the first two Forums sur l’Investissement Hôtelier Africain (FIHA), a new French sister event for AHIF.
Marriott press conference at AHIF
Communicating during a Crisis was the best rated session at the Future Hospitality Summit
During the pandemic Bench Events pioneered online conferencing for the tourism Industry, with events that attracted over 6,000 tourism/hospitality professionals and hundreds of industry leaders. Tarsh put together and moderated a panel for Hospitality Tomorrow on Communicating in a Crisis and a panel for the Saudi-government-sponsored Future Hospitality Summit on Cutting Edge Technology That Could Enable the World to Travel Again. Both sessions generated exceptionally positive audience feedback.
“I just want to congratulate you on the updates from your event, including this one in Africa. You are wise enough to send interesting, newsworthy reports coming out of the conference, especially for media who cannot attend. These are useful (we published more than one) and show understanding for what serious journalists want and need to cover an event without it reading like PR. Kudos to you and your team.” Editor in Chief, Hotels Magazine