Brazil, Colombia’s new tourism ally

Friday, 26 June 2009 00:00

The implementation of these objectives is an attempt to triple the volume of CVC tourists to Colombia by 2010. The figure could reach close to 3,000 tourists.

Proexport and CVC, Brazil’s largest tourism operator, presented their new alliance, with the basic purpose of promoting the Colombian Caribbean in the markets of Manaus, Belem, and Sao Paulo, reported Nubia Stella Martínez, Proexport’s Vice President for Tourism, upon her return from a meeting held on June 8, 2009 with Valter Patriani, President of CVC.

CVC is Latin America’s first tourism operator and is among the ten most important in the world. Additionally, it has 320 sales points and 7,000 travel agencies in its distribution network.

For this reason, it became Proexport’s and Avianca´s strategic partner in Colombia for the purpose of increasing travel of Brazilians to Colombia.

To fulfill this objective, work is being done on three specific fronts:

1. With the cooperation of Avianca, flight seats will be blocked in order to guarantee increased sales in the CVC network; that is, to give more scope to Colombian destinations, which will focus on four packages:
   
   • Cartagena and San Andrés,
     
   • Bogotá and Cartagena,
     
   • Bogotá and San Andrés,
     
   • Cartagena and Miami.

   Initially, 30 seats per week will be blocked from July to September; 50 seats, from October to November; and 100 seats from December to January.

2. CVC designed tourist packages to Cartagena and San Andrés to take advantage of the thrice-weekly Copa Airlines flights from Manaus to Panama, as well as the recent announcement of three weekly Brasilia – Manaus – Bogotá flights by GOL/Varig Airline, in the light of the fact that the Colombian Caribbean is closer for tourists from those regions of Brazil than the destinations in northeastern and southeastern Brazil.
   
3. CVC committed itself to an intensive campaign to promote these packages through its www.cvc.com.br website.

The Alliance seeks to generate information on Colombia in Brazil so that the residents or tourists who visit our country have Colombian destinations, especially the ones on the Caribbean, as a travel option.