Daisy Nascimento
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Rio - The Brazilian Tourism Institute (Embratur) plans to spend US$ 40 million this year to promote Brazil on the international market, in order to get more foreign tourists to visit the country. Last year's tourist trade balance showed a surplus of US$ 351 million, which means that foreign tourists spent more money in Brazil than Brazilians spent on their trips abroad.

This information was conveyed yesterday (11) by Embratur president Eduardo Sanovic, who was presenting the Watercolor Plan, created to attract more foreign tourists, to entrepreneurs and agents who operate in the area of tourism. The plan was based on a survey involving over six thousand people in 18 countries. According to the study, 75% of the interviewees who have never been to Brazil would visit the country for its natural attractions, especially in the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro, and 52% would come for the joy and cordiality of the Brazilian people.

According to Sanovic, the plan will permit the formulation of activities to promote and sell Brazilian products abroad on the basis of concrete scientific and technical data, so as to achieve a better performance than in the past two years. "The Watercolor Plan is a tool for us to achieve not only an US$ 8 billion inflow in the Brazilian trade balance in 2007, but to meet the greatest challenge of all, which is to receive 9 million visitors," he said.

The plan's strategies are to promote seminars in Brazil and the sale of tourism packages abroad, promote fairs, attract international events, conduct media campaigns, and, with the help of private enterprise, open international tourist promotion offices.

The president of the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Tourism Company (Riotur), Luiz Felipe Bonilha, mentioned some of the problems that, in his view, constitute stumbling blocks to getting more foreign tourists to visit the country. One of them is the US$ 100 that Americans must pay to obtain visas to travel to Brazil.

According to Bonilha, the problem in Europe is the lack of more frequent charter flights to the Northeast than the ones to Rio de Janeiro.

Translation: David Silberstein