Increasing Demand for Travel to Brazil reports Expedia
Expedia, Inc. has published data showing growth in the number of online bookings to Brazil made on the more than 100 Expedia and Hotels.com travel sites worldwide.
“Bookings made on Expedia to Brazil have grown more than 90 percent over the past year,” said Rafael del Castillo, Expedia director of market management for South America. “We’re also seeing strong growth in the number of international travellers to Brazil, especially from the U.S., the U.K. Italy, France and Spain.”
Expedia executives were in Rio de Janeiro last week to attend the annual ABAV trade show, Oct. 19-21. Expedia representatives will meet with local hotels and South American tourism and travel officials to discuss strategies for promoting travel to Brazil.
Expedia Media Solutions, the company’s advertising division, has been working closely with Brazil’s National Tourism Board, Embratur, and its advertising agencies in Europe, the U.S. and Brazil to promote the country as a tourist destination to international travellers. Though Expedia Media Solutions only recently began working in Brazil, the team has already driven impressive results for local partners such as Othon Hotels. Working closely with Tomás Ramos, Othon’s commercial director, Media Solutions helped the Brazilian chain develop a media campaign that has increased its gross bookings through Expedia by 78 percent and grown ADR by 49 percent. The company’s cost-per-click product, TravelAds, has also been increasing in popularity across Brazil as local hotels learn more about how to promote their properties on Expedia’s sites. In fact, Brazilian hotel partners participating in TravelAds have experienced returns of more than 2000 percent on average on their investment
“As the country prepares to host global events like the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, we aim to assist Brazilian hotels in effectively marketing their properties and to capture new, incremental demand from among the nearly 60 million travelers that visit our sites each month,” said Marco Tagliatti, Expedia vice president of lodging supply for Latin America and Caribbean. “In doing so, our ultimate goal is to make Brazil a top destination and help build the businesses of our local hotel partners in the process.”
