Attendants to the 2007 Central America Travel Market Air their Views on the Event

Costa Rica has just hosted the fourth edition of the Central America Travel Market, a fair that serves well the purpose of the many tourism products and services that the Central American nations have to offer to wholesalers from around the world. Even though this year’s tradeshow met its goals, some attendants believe the event could have been better planned and organized on the whole. Caribbean News Digital (CND) was the direct recipient of many of those views.

First of all, nearly all participants polled by CND agree that the turnout could have been much larger. Juan Carlos Medina, Operations and Sales Manager for the Palma Real Hotel in Honduras, told CND “that calls and contacts with tour operators were really scarce, perhaps because most of those people we expected to come here never showed up. However, we’re pleased with the deals we cut.”

A similar opinion was uttered by Marlon Reyes, Manager of Transportes Aereos de Guatemala. “In terms of organization, we’ve been in other fairs and we’ve really seen some organizational problems in this edition. There were transportation problems and those last-minute changes in our meetings with wholesalers were not adequate,” he said. “We all spend our money to come to this fair, yet the number of wholesalers wasn’t good enough if stacked up against the massive turnout we had last year in Honduras.”

We must bear in mind that unlike last year’s edition in Honduras, the Costa Rican Organizing Committee decided not to invite U.S. wholesalers in a bid to keep the Central American fair just to its original targeted groups: long-haul outbound markets like Europe, that this time around accounted for 90 percent of total attendance. This decision holds water for some; for others, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

One of the highlights of the 2007 CATM in Costa Rica was the debut of New Zealand, Australia, Israel and the Middle East, a quartet of outbound markets that could mean a lot to the entire region in the near future. “Some of the few visits we received had to do with new contacts, and those people are very interested in promoting the Central American destination right away. That’s very encouraging and beneficial,” Mr. Medina pointed out.

“I imagined this fair was going to be better built and that we were going to have the possibility of making prearranged appointments with wholesalers, of having the chance to talk to them a little bit more,” said Matilde Fischelda, an Italian tour operator. “But it was a huge chaos because the whole schedule ran amok and we didn’t have the chance of huddling with those people we have contacted with in the first place.”

Other attendants surveyed by CND owned up they were actually a tad peeved by the Organizing Committee’s eleventh-hour decision to drop the prearranged appointment timetable, a move that, as some people said, made things go somewhat wild.

However, others were piqued by the free-for-all concept, like Marco Vinicio Martinez, Marketing Manager of Viajero.com, a travel-and-tour Internet portal. “People were fully open to engage in talks and participate more, and many of us have made good friends and great working relations in the process,” he admitted.

A majority of participants who talked with CND on the 2007 CATM agreed there were several loose ends in terms of organization and planning. For the sales manager of the Vista Real Guatemala Hotel, “the exhibition grounds were too hot and too narrow, and a number of collateral activities dragged on for way too long. In addition to that, there were transportation problems. Those are details that need to be ironed out for coming editions.”

As in previous editions, pre-tours and post-tours were welcome news for most attendants and exhibitors. “That’s indeed a good initiative that gives us sort of an on-the-spot perspective of the kind of travel destination we’re selling,” Juan Pelaez, from Spain’s Marazul Group, told Caribbean News Digital.