In a new PANROTAS survey of the best sales promoters in Greater São Paulo* asked the question “Who were the best among the operators?” and CVC dominated the scenario. Of the eight operators receiving the most votes,  the leader, Vivian Lima (right), and four others are from CVC Operadora, one from Trend and one from Visual. Only Interep, with the presence of Suellen Bandeira (ranked sixth) prevented total domination of the list by CVC brands. The results were based on a tally of more than 815 voters. As some teams have more professionals than others, PANROTAS also add the most voted companies in general.

The Best Sales Teams

1. CVC
2. Grupo Trend
3. Visual
4. Flytour MMT
5. Abreu Viagens

In the above ranking, No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 are brands of CVC, Brazil’s largest travel company, which is both tour operator and travel agency. Grupo Trend is especially strong in Florida, where it has offices. Flytour MMT is Brazil’s second largest company; it was created with the merger—formalized earlier this year—of Flytour and MMT Gapnet. Number 5 Abreu is the oldest travel agency in the country, having begun operations in 1840 in Portugal. Abreu has a receptive tour operator division operating out of Orlando.

 

 

 

According to a new survey, 92 percent of Brazilians are looking for price and destination information before making package purchases.

One of the segments that most generate research by travelers, said the results of the survey, which was conducted by Mind Miners for Paypal Brazil, is airfare—53 percent of travelers collect airline ticket information on the internet. Also:

—Four out of 10 researchers (41 percent) opt for meta search engines

—27 percent go directly to company websites, suggesting that brand loyalty could be a factor for some researchers.

—The remaining 35 percent in the survey focus on price, preferring to do their research directly at travel agencies.

In another Paypal-sponsored survey—this one conducted by Big Data Corporation—about one out of every eight tourism-related websites are for travel agencies. Specifically, there are more than 21 million websites in Brazil, with nerly 340,000 dedicated to the tourism sector; 19 percent of them conduct some kind of electronic sales transaction. (For the survey, Big Data considered as ‘travel agency’ site all those who sell packages and not necessarily big companies). Also:

—Tourism sites are represented by hotels (20 percent), travel agencies (12 percent), ticket sales (7 percent), a wide range of travel blogs (41 percent) and corporate sites (14 percent).

—All totaled, about 24 percent have physical stores.

—Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of the travelers consulted guarantee-to-hire services through the internet (37 percent of them in shopping sites and 13 percent directly with the company), while 29 percent still prefer to go to the travel agency to make purchases.

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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