Tourism is already one of the economies that generates the most foreign currency around the world. And in this trend, the Minister of Tourism of the Nation, Gustavo Santos, assured that an agreement has already been confirmed with the Chinese magnate Jack Ma to market Argentine tourist destinations in Asia through the Alibaba platform.
At a press conference, the Minister indicated that the The agreement will be signed in the coming days when representatives of the online sales platform arrive in Buenos Aires for the 18th World Summit of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), to be held on April 18 and 19.
In light of this, he assured Santos: "It is the tourism that is coming. The Chinese travel around Asia but have not gone out into the world. And South America still represents only 2,6% of the total trips in the five continents." Now, thanks to the agreement, Argentina will offer its destinations to all of Asia and to a market of 1.700 billion potential clients.
According to figures from the Ministry of Tourism, In 2015, around 32.000 Chinese tourists visited Argentina; in 2017, this figure doubled to 62.000, and the goal is to increase that number to 150.000 over the next two years. According to figures from the specialized website Travel China Guide, it is an outbound tourism market that has been growing for a decade and moves US$ 104.500 billion per year, details Apertura.
"The first to get on board and offer packages will be Chinese travel agencies that have been selling Argentina for years and that know the Chinese market best, but it is open to all agencies that meet the conditions required by Alibaba."He explained Gustavo Santos.
With an unstoppable trend towards e-commerce, Alibaba is an e-commerce giant and is considered the most powerful platform in the world. The man behind such a volume of business is the Chinese businessman Jack Ma, who visited Argentina in May 2017, when he met with Mauricio Macri and then in December 2017, in the framework of the WTO Ministerial Conference, where he was a speaker.
This agreement, which will initially last for two years, will include airlines from around the world that fly to Buenos Aires and also have routes to China, so they can offer connections so that the inhabitants of the Asian giant can visit Argentine tourist destinations. This is a strategy already applied by Canada, where they had their pavilion in Alibaba and it was a success.
The goal is for the Argentine pavilion to be available on Alibaba in July or August and for it to already have a wide range of tourist packages to Argentina for November 11, when “Singles’ Day” is commemorated in China, an Asian version of Black Friday in which various discounts are offered and records double the American sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday together in a single day.
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