CATA Remains Committed to Giving Central American Tourism the Upper Hand
2019 meant a year for the recovery of regional tourism with a view to further boosting tourist arrivals. However, at the end of the same year, the proliferation of the COVID-19 virus broke out in China, reaching Europe and then the Americas.
At the beginning of 2020, the world faced an unprecedented challenge. COVID-19 demonstrated its ability to stop global activity, with tourism being one of the industries most affected. On March 7, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a global pandemic.
This posed a much greater challenge for the Central American Tourism Promotion Agency (CATA), which through Promotourist, its public relations agency, and its digital marketing agency in Europe, has redoubled its efforts to rethink its promotion strategy in the target markets: Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The agency is implementing reactive and mitigating communication actions in the short and medium term in order to keep the region's tourism product in the top of mind of the public in the European markets. CATA has also joined efforts in line with the communication and strategic vision of the World Tourism Organization through the first campaign called Stay At Home.
For its part, together with the digital marketing agency, CATA continues to reinforce the Stay At Home message and is preparing to launch an inspirational video campaign, as well as an integration campaign with an emphasis on regional solidarity, unity and support for the tourism sector in Central America and the Dominican Republic.
In addition, it will launch destination promotion campaigns showing the safety, health and well-being that the region can guarantee so that travelers have their best experience while in the region. Also, through the living face of tourism, CATA will work with videos of Tour Operators, National Tourism Authorities and Presidents of Tourism Chambers to direct messages to the issuing markets.
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The platform for multi-destination packages in their Spanish and English versions is another central axis of CATA to digitize the tourism offer of the countries in the region, which complement each other with a variety of destinations. This will be possible through a strategic alliance with digital industry players to manage the online reputation of the tourism offer.
As for Promotourist, CATA's public relations agency in Europe, efforts have been focused on generating content that enhances the region's tourism product through press releases on gastronomy, ecotourism, culture and film. Newsletters focused on each country's product are also planned
At the same time, the Agency has also managed the vision of the countries of the region in coordination with the National Tourism Authorities (ANT) and the National Chambers of Tourism grouped in the Federation of Central American Tourism Chambers (FEDECATUR), through technical meetings that print the need to unify efforts to mitigate the current crisis.
In addition, a special commission has been created with officials from each of the countries of the region in which official and timely information is updated daily on the situation and the measures that the governments of the region are adopting over time to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Similarly, this space serves to inform the region about the current state of the CATA target markets.
Currently, CATA is working with the public and private sectors of the region on a Mitigation and Recovery Plan for the tourism sector that should be implemented as a regional block. This plan seeks to provide guidance and orientation to national tourism authorities and chambers of tourism in order to understand how the current context will affect the development of regional tourism, as well as to identify guidelines for action for the mitigation and subsequent recovery of the sector. Some of the actions and opportunities included in the plan are:
- Improvement of financing management with opportunities for financial support for CATA.
- Evaluation of priority markets in this new context, discovering new markets along the way or improving the focus of existing ones.
- Reconstruction of image and relaunching of an image that consolidates or represents in the new context the entire SICA region of which not only countries of the isthmus already form part.
- New products in priority markets in this new context.
- Consolidation of technological tools for marketing.
- Establishment of a new set of indicators and a monitoring system to support decision-making
More information: https://www.visitcentroamerica.com/
