Tourism Marketing in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria: Advertising and Public Relations in Perspective

Tourism is a very complex industry because of its multi-faceted activities which together produce the ‘tourist product’, and also because of the various subsectors that are in themselves industries, if considered independently. Its complexity lies in the tourism promotion in its various forms directed at large number of people in various lands of different socio-economic structures, having different needs, expectations and behavior patterns. Tourism competition is constantly growing as more and more destinations seek to attract tourists and more companies and organizations become involved in highly skilled business of destination planning, transportation, accommodation and catering for the tourists. Apart from the enormous oil and gas in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, it is endowed with a lot of festivals and cultural events that are tourist attractions, which qualifies it as a tourism destination; and exploring them would add to the socio-economic development of the area. One of such is the Amakama wonder tree and Ibeno beach, a subset of the Niger Delta. The numerous tourism potentials it exhibits indicate that it is a money spinner if adequately explored. This paper, anchored on Public Relations model and source credibility theory, relied on library and archival sources as methods to identify and highlight the tourism components in the Akamaka wonder tree and Ibeno beach as well as suggested steps that could be taken to boost the potentials inherent as a tourism product. The study concluded that despite the human activities and disruption of nature, strict measures should be taken to protect this tourist destination for development because both local and foreign investors would be attracted to the area to invest their money. We, therefore, recommended that adequate security measures should be put in place and enhanced for potential tourists, and more money should be allocated to the culture and tourism sector in the annual budgets of the states in the region, among others.