Travel buyers trooping to TBEX for B2B deals

Hundreds of the country’s buyers and sellers of travel packages will gather under one roof for a businessto-business (B2B) meeting aimed at boosting national and international tourist traffic and benefiting the small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

With the slogan “Creating a Responsible Travel Business Line,” the B2B meeting dubbed “Travel Business Exchange (TBEX) Pilipinas 2018” will be held at the Clark Marriott Hotel on Nov. 8-9, with SMEs under the Network of Independent Travel & Allied Services (NITAS) Philippines Inc. participating.

Both buyers and sellers, according to TBEX Pilipinas project director and business event creator Angel Ramos Bognot, are coming from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, including other countries.

“Mostly medium size, NITAS-member companies can quickly form consortiums to organize big-volume tour packages that can fill up airline seats in any flight to anywhere in the country or across the world,” Bognot said.

The sellers are industry suppliers, such as airlines, hotels, restaurants and catering firms, resorts and spas, tour and transport operators, destination management companies, retirement clinics and medical tourism hospitals, souvenirs and dive shops, and other service providers.

A seller is allocated a minimum of 38 different buyers at a maximum of 12 minutes for each B2B session.

The buyers are either retail or wholesale travel agents duly licensed to transact business directly with tourism and travel consumers.

“Thus, bringing the buyers and sellers together under one roof in one-on-one B2B meetings can yield highly productive marketing tie-ups, long-term partnerships and joint ventures on innovative travel packaging schemes, multi-point linkages and other modes of functional complementation or relational collaborations,” Bognot added.

Managed by Afro Asian World Events (tel: 632-3100354; fax: 632-5236537; email: tbexpilipinas@gmail.com), TBEX is an industry event to widen tourism’s playing field; develop new destinations, products and services; generate end-to-end travel solutions and business opportunities for all; sustain SME growth and expansion; and serve as an economic growth engine.

“Over the past 10 years, we have succeeded in making TBEX a well-recognized travel-trade event that benefits all industry sectors, including the natural environment,” Bognot stressed, referring to Bantay Kalikasan, another private sector beneficiary.