The Business Year Special Report
Carlos Canales, President, National Chamber of Tourism (CANATUR)
CANATUR is working to restart activities in tourism while calling for subsides and credit financing for smaller tourism businesses.
What is your assessment of the response of Peru’s tourism sector to COVID-19, and how has CANATUR engaged with this response?
The impact of COVID-19 has and will continue to have a drastic impact on the economic, social, and labor aspects of Peru’s tourism. The economic and labor measures initially taken by the government mainly helped big and medium-sized companies, while small-sized companies, tour guides, and craftsmen were severely affected. Thus, CANATUR made it its mission to persuade the government to adopt measures that could safely allow for the reopening of businesses, for example, allowing hotels and restaurants to deliver food, helping them access credit financing, and the provision of subsidies. A specific measure taken by Peruvian government was the creation of the program Reactiva Perú whereby the government granted financing to the private sector. We were fortunate the Foreign Trade and Tourism Minister sector acknowledged the crisis and worked hand in hand with CANATUR and the private sector. CANATUR has helped and promoted the restart of activities in tourism; however, a complete reactivation of the sector has not yet been accomplished.
In what ways has CANATUR updated its organization digitally, and what have been the results?
With the new protocols issued as a result of COVID-19, maintaining physical distance has become a necessity. However, the need to be in contact has remained, and, therefore, we had to take various measures in a short amount of time to innovate and implement measures to keep us connected. Instead of physical meetings, we have used various platforms such as Zoom, Webex, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Those platforms have become our eyes and ears, and working from home has become the new normal. The digital transformation arrived overnight and is here to stay. CANATUR started to organize its national and international promotion fairs through 3D platforms such as Virtway, Virtual Up, and Hyperfair. They allow us to have virtual stands and avatars, allowing for online interactions. That helped us with our event Peru Travel Mart Virtual Edition and Perú Regiones Virtual. As a result of the challenges faced, we created CANATUR Marketplace, a virtual platform that helped promote internal tourism and link supply with demand in a safe manner in favor of SMEs that had no access to technology. Today, teleworking, virtual fairs, and the marketplace have been internalized in our organization.
Your vision for next year is to become the key institution setting the tone for all tourism businesses and entities in Peru. What is the outlook for this vision, and how close are you to achieving it?
Even though 2020 has been the worst year in the history of global tourism, it has made us more resilient. Our job is to represent the 15 allied guilds and the 120 most important companies of the country before the government as representatives of the private tourism sector in order to create measures that will not only support and protect them, but also reactivate their activities. This second wave will demand a new approach from us in order to save the companies in this sector. The way forward is local tourism until 2023, when hopefully tourism will resume fully again. All that will inspire greater confidence in travelers to visit destinations such as Peru, a country filled with nature, culture, and extraordinary spaces that mark us out as an outstanding destination. CANATUR is determined to promote local tourism in the short term—two years—in order to allow sufficient visits to reactivate the sector, and subsequently allow for a rapid and strong comeback in 2023. The following four to five years will be spent trying to recover from the impact of COVID-19 and to achieve all of the work done in the past 20 years. We are trying to reinvent and diversify our supply in order to satisfy the new demand that consumers will require post pandemic.