Association’s Ambassador in Chile Envisions the new Role of Journalists in Driving Tourism Recovery

The Chilean Association of Tourism Journalists (APTUR) recently appointed World Food Travel Association ambassador Dalma Díaz Pinto, to serve as its President for the 2021-2023 term.

APTUR supports the reactivation of tourism in Chile, by leveraging journalists whose job is to inform, educate, advise and promote tourism as a tool for sustainable development for the country. APTUR works to strengthen the skills and competencies of its members with a key focus on digital transformation and connecting with networks throughout Chile and the rest of Latin America. Sustainability, collaboration, and communication are the pillars of APTUR’s new board of directors that was elected for the 2021 – 2023 term.

Dalma shared that “we are at a time when the reactivation of the tourism industry needs truthful, timely information, based on objective evidence and with clear arguments for decision-making and the construction of public-private governance. We must focus on tourism as a productive and sustainable activity that energizes our national economy. Tourism must respect the identity, communities and natural resources of all our territories. It must strengthen the pride and uniqueness of all of our tourism offerings. New tourism arrivals will facilitate economic recovery by re-employing workers in thousands of jobs that our industry represented before the pandemic.”

We want to be involved with what we do best, and be present from north to south of Chile, co-creating with our partners and organizations that bet on the reorganization of tourism: decentralized, inclusive and sustainable. For this reason, our board members hail not just from Santiago, but from all regions of Chile – men and women with outstanding professional careers. We will work to reassess the role played by our members – journalists, communicators and media specialized in tourism within the Chilean and Latin American tourism value chain. We will also focus on APTUR members to strengthen their effectiveness, with emphasis on digital transformation, preparing ourselves to actively assume the role that tourism demands today and the new way of managing and promoting destinations. That is how we can best contribute as communication specialists,” she said.

WFTA Executive Director Erik Wolf said that he was delighted to see such a positive and proactive approach to regenerating tourism in Chile. Recently, the WFTA held a Latin America roundtable that focused on using gastronomy as a tool for tourism regeneration. Over 150 tourism professionals from all around Latin America registered for the roundtable. The Association’s Culinary Capitals program is another tool that is focused on how destinations use their gastronomy/cuisine/food and drink as tools of tourism regeneration.