The Brazilian travel trade publication PANROTAS has just ranked the nation’s tour and travel businesses in several categories, and the formidable presence of CVC and its various brands, helps to define just what the tourism industry’s distribution system looks like and how it works. Some observations:
—For as large as Brazil is, the tour operator segment is small, not much larger than a family reunion. The Brazil Tour Operators Association (Braztoa) says it has more than 90 tour operator members, although INBOUND found the number smaller when doing a search of the organization’s website.
—The small number of operators is deceptive, as it obscures the relationship between tour operators and travel agencies because, throughout Brazil, the office that houses a travel agency will also house a similarly branded tour operator. Someone making a booking at or through a travel agency will have a travel agent going to the tour operator component of the business it is a part of in order to assemble a package using an operator’s rates. Who gets credited with the booking?
The Association of Brazilian Travel Agents, or ABAV (Associação Brasileiros de Agents de Viagem) says it has more than 3,000 associated companies, in charge of 80 percent of the national market service. ABAV’s site tells us that In Brazil, according to official data, travel agencies have nearly 35,000 direct employments and more than 100,000 indirect employments. (CVC, the nation’s largest operator, is also its largest travel agency, with some 1,200 locations throughout Brazil.)
—The tour and travel sector of the Brazilian economy is recovering. The data regarding operators furnished by PANROTAS shows double digit percentage increases in sales turnover for 2017. This is due in part to the fact that the of the worst economic recession in Brazil in a century—so bad that the news media referred to the situation simply as “A Crise” (“The Crisis”)—was in its trough in 2016, as bankruptcies in the tour and travel industry continued following the collapse in 2015 of Nascimento Turismo, the nation’s second-largest tour operator. In other words, there was no direction for the industry to go last year but up.
The following tables were compiled from material in PANROTAS.
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