Brazil’s Gramado Tourism Festival Closes a Year of Major Travel Fairs

The 19th edition of the Gramado Tourism Festival, scheduled from Nov. 22 to 25 in Brazil, will roll down the curtains of the world travel industry’s major tradeshows in 2007.

The 35th Brazilian Tourism Exposition and Congress of Travel Agencies kicked off last Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro, a full month in advance to the main event in Rio Grande del Sur, in Las Hortensias region.

Unlike previous edition, this year’s Gramado Tourism Festival will present a number of collateral travel and market events on such hot topics as ecotourism and adventure tourism, tourism technology, rural travel, health tourism, travel-related businesses, and mystical and religious tourism.

Organizers say the new format will make it easier for wholesalers and exhibitors from Brazil, the rest of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe to huddle with one another in much friendlier and more businesslike way.

The event’s planners have pinned many of their expectations on a turnout of approximately 13,000 travel agents and tour operators who might be willing to get firsthand, on-the-spot information on a number of travel destinations around Brazil.

Twenty years since its big break in the Brazilian tourism scenario back in 1987, the Gramado Tourism Festival continues to gain momentum among political and entrepreneurial circles in the country and overseas. As the organizers put it, the professional level of this event has actually prompted its growth in every sense.