In this context, Travel2latam spoke with Alejandra Agudelo, Head of Sales for Europe at Avianca.
What expectations did Avianca have when it came to WTM in London?
We are very pleased because we continue to strengthen our operational capacity from London to Bogotá, connecting with all of Latin America. We maintain our daily flight and we are reinforcing our operations and new features regarding our Business class. We are making major changes to Business Class Europe, which we know as our flagship. And we also have news about this service improvement to the Americas, where we have implemented Business Class Americas as a service that we are recovering after the pandemic.
We have come back with a lot of it, with a fairly strong operational growth from Europe, where in addition to London we have recently opened Paris-Bogotá as a daily flight. All these connections strengthen the relationship between Colombia and Europe. At the moment, there are many changes and innovations that can be seen in the Business Class experience, which is one of the most relevant topics that we have come to promote. And obviously, we continue with a very strong campaign with Procolombia and with the main operators to strengthen the entire tourist offer of Colombia through our internal domestic connectivity.
All the growth we have had recently is very relevant, also generating new routes internally for Colombia such as Quibdó-Arauca, which are regions that we usually do not handle in our route network.
We are in the Americas pavilion and most of the destinations you fly to on the continent are present here. Have you held meetings with officials from each of the governments?
Yes, we are in constant collaboration with Procolombia, Promperú, with authorities in Ecuador and Central America, where we have a very strong bond.
We have our second most important hub after Bogotá, which is El Salvador, and there we have also had exponential growth in all connectivity, where we have increased capacity to Panama.
We are increasing frequencies and there are a lot of new routes that obviously have a positive impact on the Americas. We recently opened Tulum from Bogotá. We have a permanent and active commitment with all the authorities and tourism offices. We have been carrying out an active Promperú campaign for almost the entire month of October, because we have very good connectivity from London connecting via Bogotá to Cusco. This is a multilateral benefit. Although direct connectivity is from Bogotá, in the end what it allows is access to a lot of destinations in South America in a very simple way, with agile connections, and we are here to also promote Latin America and all its exotic destinations, even the most remote ones, so that people know a little more about us.