Tourism will earn Brazil a recording-breaking US$ 4 billion in 2004, corresponding to the amount spent by 4 million 900 thousand foreign visitors. This information was provided by the president of the Brazilian Institute of Tourism (Embratur), Eduardo Sanovicz, who was interviewed on the “Brazil Magazine” program on National AM Radio.
Nevertheless, Brazil still needs to resolve what the Embratur president calls “complicating factors for tourism” in order for this activity to become an even more significant part of the Brazilian economy.
The chief of these factors is urban violence in the major centers, which has tarnished the country’s image abroad. To overcome these bottlenecks, Sanovicz says that the strategy has been to diversify the promotion of products.
“We have moved beyond the old practice of exclusively promoting the sun and sea segment. We still maintain this, obviously, but for the last two years we have been placing a lot of emphasis on the quality and diversity of Brazil’s cultural production.
This has been the key to all our promotion, and this is the reason that the results are starting to become expressive,” the Embatur president reveals.
To help this process along, Embratur is also expanding Brazil’s participation in international fairs and events in the sector.
Whereas the average participation in events was 16 in 2002, it rose to 43 fairs in 2004 and should embrace 57 promotions in 2005.
At the same time, the Institute has also sponsored the Brazil Caravan, one of the instruments used to attract tourism operators and travel agents from all over the world, as a way to publicize tourism in Brazil in new markets.
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil