In this context, Travel2latam spoke with Rafael Quesada, Head of Advertising and Research at the ICT, Costa Rican Tourism Institute.
What is the importance for the ICT of participating in this event?
Well, we are picking up this event again after several years. The truth is that we have seen the event with very good eyes. It has fulfilled many of the expectations that we expected in terms of the possibility of business, then the businessmen are full of appointments, we still need the process of asking them how the appointments were, but for our part we believe that the event has fulfilled a lot of the expectations we brought in terms of business possibilities.
We are reaching the end of the season and the number of initiatives that ICT has had during this year has been really very active. I wanted to reflect on it.
The most important milestone is having recovered, not only in the meeting tourism part, but also in the leisure part, its 2019 numbers. In addition, the country has managed to recover the airlines that arrived to our country, so I think we are to close a year, in which Costa Rica has quickly recovered everything it had lost during the pandemic, and waiting for 2024 to be even more profitable.
What prospects do you feel can happen in 2024? What do you see as new challenges?
Well, as new challenges for next year we are going to start everything that is Fiexpo for Costa Rica in 2025, but the initiative has to happen from next year and the truth is that we have high expectations to become more a little more aggressive, in how to go after clients and companies.
How do you work together with the private sector that supports you so much to always present new opportunities to those who have already been working with you?
Well, as you see, she is the director of the Convention Bureau, Tatiana Orozco. We work absolutely and completely hand in hand. Our philosophy has always been in ICT, and in all fields it tries to do so, that we must strengthen ourselves by uniting together with the private sector to be able to formulate solid short, medium and long term strategies, so definitely we in the MICE part work 100% hand in hand with the Bureau. It is an alliance that we hope will be maintained for a long time.
Before you were talking about strategy. What's new regarding event participation in the coming year?
There are some events that we want to explore, for example in Mexico. And in fact, we were analyzing several events that could possibly be in the country. We are in that work and soon we are going to define, because we have to define hiring, so we will define in the short term.