Travel Buddy
Tourists are a special category of crime victim. One could think of a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that attacks on tourists still make the news in South Africa. But the most important reason, from the point of view of this article, is that they don’t know their surroundings, and don’t usually know what to look out for, and are therefore more susceptible than your average crime-conscious South African to falling prey to a criminal.
The SAPS, overburdened as it is, does not tend to recognise and accommodate the special vulnerabilities of tourists. Some steps have been towards establishing a special crime unit in the tourism hotspot of Cape Town, but it is limited to smoothing the way for tourists AFTER they have become victims, rather than preventing the crimes that affect them in the first place.
Andre Snyman has a liking for using the power of individuals to solve problems that most people regard as someone else’s job. He has recognised the lack of attention to the needs of international tourists, and he has come up with an ingenuous scheme to make travelling in South Africa safer and more pleasant for them. Essentially, he gets ordinary South Africans to look after the tourists by SMS.
Travel Buddy is a cell phone-based service which gives tourists who register with it a 24-hour, nation-wide friend, guide and security consultant. Instant help, from virtually anywhere. Travel Buddies is an endeavour to harness the miracle of cell phone technology, which we have come to take so much for granted, for the benefit of international tourists and, indirectly, the good of the country.
How does it work? A tourist planning a trip to South Africa will first register online and pay a once-off fee of R235. On arrival in South Africa, he or she will be greeted by the representative of a local cell phone company (one of Travel Buddy’s sponsors), buy a local SIM card at the airport, or hire a phone, and be given a number to call for a Travel Buddy who lives in each of the areas in which he or she will be spending time. Tourists virtually anywhere in the country will find a buddy near at hand. Information about hi-jacking hotspots, or no-go areas, is only a phone call away.
Every province has a Travel Buddy group. The members of the group have put together their own reaction teams to respond to calls, governed by the kind of emergencies that tourists will be likely to encounter in the area, and they have drawn up a reaction plan to suit these circumstances.
But the service is not limited to helping tourists keep safe. They are free to ask about any of the multitude of issues that might be relevant to someone travelling in a foreign city, from getting lost, to problems with travel documents, to negotiating through an insurance claim. They can find out about the beaches that only locals know, and about local events worth attending, or about what weather to expect. They can find out where to do their banking, or where to go to eat, dance, dive, shop, fly, or drink. They can also make use of a translator service as an optional extra.
Altogether, there are three or four hundred Travel Buddies across the country. The members are drawn from the approximately 15 000 members of another of Snyman’s schemes, called eBlockWatch, and the number of Travel Buddies have gradually increased over the two years the programme has been running.
There is no formal volunteer selection process. When a request comes through for a Travel Buddy in area where there are currently none, Snyman himself will check out the lists of local eBlockWatch members and decide who might be a suitable candidate. Most of them he already knows personally anyway. The process is very organic and very individualised.
The national structure keeps the contact numbers of all members and can, if necessary, send out bulk SMS messages to hundreds of its members within minutes if there is a message which will be applicable to all tourists across the country.
The advantages of becoming a volunteer are strictly non-financial. None of them are paid for their work, and they are rewarded only by the opportunity to meet interesting strangers and make a contribution to the tourism industry.
Many of the volunteers are in fact already involved in tourism, and see Travel Buddy as a chance to help boost the market. The Automobile Association (AA), for example, encourages its bed and breakfast accommodation members to become volunteers.
Travel Buddy is a not-for-profit organisation. Snyman himself has a paying job as the owner of a trucking business - the SMS system he uses to communicate with his customers was the original inspiration for both eBlockWatch and Travel Buddy.
To understand Travel Buddy properly, it is important to look at its origins in eBlockWatch. This scheme was designed for local residents. Snyman invented it in 2001 as a way of opening up channels of communication between the people and the police. After hearing about a missing child on the radio, he called up the station to speculate about how technology could be harnessed to improve communication about crimes. Shortly afterwards, to his surprise, he was asked to meet with an official from the SAPS who wanted to explore the idea further.
As a result, eBlockWatch came into existence with the objective of creating a partnership between the police and the people. Information technology company DiData donated R300 000 and a great deal of employees’ time towards developing a database system. It is now in operation across the country with about 15 000 members. The idea, he says, is to “create a network so large that that very little criminal activity can take place without a witness”.
People register their names, cell phone numbers and addresses at their local police station. Registration is free, although you must pre-purchase your SMS credits and each SMS costs one Rand. On registration, each member is given a number to call to report incidents.
The scheme allows for communication in different ways.
The network of citizens who are members of eBlockWatch can communicate with each other via a central call centre in Johannesburg, which is on standby 24 hours a day.
If, for example, someone witnesses a robbery, he or she will call the hotline and post a report on the website. From there, an SMS alert is sent out to all members within the vicinity of the robbery. Assigned area co-ordinators will contact the relevant authorities, as well as the community members, to let them know about what to look out for and what precautions to take. A member could also ask for an alert to be raised about an attempted hi-jacking, for example, which would ensure that other members avoid that particular spot.
Hoax calls are not a problem, Snyman says. Because a call costs money, and the source can be traced, the temptation to abuse the system is far less strong than it is for calls to the SAPS’s 10111 number. SMSs are also not sent directly by members to other members, but via the call centre. This allows for proper record-keeping and monitoring.
Communication lines also run from the police to the community. If the local police know of a threat which people in the community need to be aware of, or know of a crime which has already been committed and which community members could potentially help to solve, they will notify registered users by SMS.
The scheme goes beyond electronic communication; it also operates small teams of patrolling members made up of both police officers and interested residents. This is controlled by one co-ordinator in each area in which eBlockWatch operates.
There are some costs associated with the scheme. But corporate sponsors are beginning to show interest. Snyman is also negotiating with a cell phone provider to help fund it, and with a computer company to take over registration and reporting.
Snyman says that eBlockWatch has resulted directly in the arrest of hi-jackers, rapists and murders, helped recover stolen goods, helped find missing people, and exposed scams. One example he relates concerns a member of eBlockWatch who spotted 1000 tyres in a warehouse in Eskort belonging to a previously convicted hi-jacker. He reported it, and an SMS went out to all its tyre and transport members. Within a few minutes it was discovered that the tyres had been taken in a truck hi-jacking. The SAPS raised the warehouse and, within three hours of the report, the tyres were recovered and the thieves arrested.
EBlock and Travel Buddy are essentially about giving back to law-abiding South Africans the power which criminals take away from us. We are advised, when we become victims of crime, to co-operate with the criminals and whatever else we do, not to fight back. This might save our lives, but leaves us feeling imprisoned by our helplessness. These two schemes give us the opportunity to take on criminals, but in a way that is completely safe and completely non-violent. Few things can be more empowering than that.
Anyone wanting to find out more about Travel Buddy or eBlockWatch can call Andre Snyman on +2782 561 1065.
Julia Frielinghaus
Julia Frielinghaus is a researcher for a political party. She writes in her personal capacity.