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As it’s happened each November over the past 22 years, the Excelencias team has attended the year’s last fair, considered by the participating professionals as the first in the face of the negotiations they might start in 2019. It’s in Spain’s FITUR and ITB Berlin in Germany where the 2018 season comes to an end, two events that are recovering -just like every other fair in Europe- after the crisis the Old World went through.
WTM is the world’s third-largest fair in terms of travel and tourism, where the Caribbean attends massively with the turnout of all English-speaking islands, Commonwealth members, French- and Dutch-speaking nations, in addition to Bermuda and Barbados -the headquarters of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) are on the latter.
Clustered in the so-called Caribbean Village, in the course of the last 21 years we have stood up for their right to attend FITUR. That’s something we won’t stop calling for.
Unfortunately, the vision of the English-speaking islands, the lack of budgets and the multitude of hardships they have to endure as a result of passing hurricanes, have combined to prevent those small island nations from attending that tradeshow in a massive way.
However, those that have attended are simply coming back time and again. The largest nations, such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico have never ever failed to attend FITUR. Jamaica has now reeled in Spanish visitors and investors, putting over 50 percent of the island nation’s entire stock of hotel beds under the all-inclusive system. This is a token of the trust Jamaica has put on FITUR.
Sometimes, no major job is done in branching out markets and this is owed more to traditional behaviors on the part of the tourism authorities rather than to numbers and figures. There’s no doubt that the U.S. is the Caribbean’s closest outbound market, but should the Iberian-American market be ruled out because of that? With each passing day, those countries look further to the future and interesting numbers of tourists are found in those markets. Their outcomes would be a whole lot better if they could make a change in their promotional and pricing policies.The attendance of Iberian-American at FITUR and ITB is far larger in terms of participating countries. The marketing of those fair must be seen from a broader scope when it comes to local outbound markets. Buyers are out there, so let’s cash in on those events to piece together our agendas. FITUR is the number-one fair to have access to those professionals. We invite you to read and follow our publications through the Excelencias app.