The challenges of the Nicaraguan touristic sector

Clementine Haudecoeur | Oct 5, 2015

Around two hundreds entrepreneurs from Nicaraguan touristic sector participated in the First Meeting of Touristic Entrepreneurs, last September 29th. This is how successful was this event organized by the University of Commercial Sciences (UCC), the Network of Businesses of Nicaragua (REN) and the touristic webpage ViaNica.com, which allowed talking about new actions to be taken Nicaraguan tourism.

Everything began with a round table animated by Róger Solórzano Gaitán, president of Vianica.com, and composed by famous people from the sector and pioneers entrepreneurs in the development of Nicaraguan tourism. The speakers commented on their experiences related to the first charter flight, the first cruises or the first surf tournament, but also about their experience of marketing management in order to build up tourism as it is today.

Some mistakes made were revealed, but they also exposed a menu of new businesses opportunities to be developed such as the options of secondary services connected to tourism and the importance to impulse cultural and gastronomical tourism.

“We need to work together in order to project ourselves as a destination for the emergent tourism and for that we need to polish what we have, it is not enough to have a lot of nature and cultural tradition, we need to work to promote it as attractions”, expressed Lucy Valenti, actual presidenta of the National Chamber of Tourism in Nicaragua (CANATUR).

In order to proceed towards that objective, several experts explained the necessity to well study the demand, improve human resources, fight against the bad habit to through everything in the streets, always study the different attractions the country has to offer and work together in order to overcome difficult challenges.

To end the event, some awards were granted to pioneers of touristic development, such as Raúl Calvet, for managing successfully the first rural hotel in Centro America in 1936, and Nejama Bergman, for creating the first tourism school of the country.

In order to close the meeting, Valenti invited the public to keep making tourism a dynamic motor of economic, social, and environmental development.

This first meeting succeeded in gathering a lot of different actors from the sector and demonstrated the interest of everyone to work together in order to manage a real change of strategy and thus being able to better win future potential visitors (there will be 1,800 million of travelers in the world 15 years from now, according the World Tourism Organization).