Portugal’s Secretary of State for Tourism, Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, and his counterpart for Spanish Tourism, Maria Isabel Borrego Cortes, yesterday signed an agreement aiming to unite the efforts of the two countries for the promotion of tourism to emerging international markets such as the United States, Canada, China, Japan and South Korea.
Promotional plans for 2014 are already pretty much set so the agreement looks at next year when an 'action plan' will be launched, "The plan this year will focus exclusively on press visits and familiarisation of the tourism trade sector," said Nunes.
Despite the desire for closer contact between the two countries the idea is not to promote the Iberian Peninsula as a destination but still to concentrate on each country as a valid destination in its own right.
The signed agreement did not go so far as to outline any expenditure necessary to achieve it noble aims but there will be time to allocate a budget in the 2015 tourism budgets of each country, if they have not forgotten all about the idea by then.
Adolfo Mesquita Nunes said that various press junkets are already planned and the secretaries of state are next going to ask Turismo de Portugal and the Spanish Tourism Board to see if any existing promotional plans can be coordinated. If the answer is 'no' then this agreement will have to concentrate on 2015 for the big push.
