TOURISM FAIRS: PRIVATE SECTOR PERSPECTIVE ON PLANNING AND EFFECTIVENESS

Abstract

Venezuela participates in programmed tourist events of global relevance, being the effectiveness of the fair part of the holistic process of its planning. To this end, the objectives of the fairs are aligned with the objectives of the national institutional plans and with those of the institutional marketing plan. The fair effectiveness of the aforementioned process has been little discussed in the scientific literature, despite the fact that participation in international tourism fairs is contemplated in the National Strategic Tourism Plan 2015-2019, as marketing strategies, with the intention of both increasing receptive tourism and projecting the image of the country abroad. The article aims to present the correlation between the incidence of the factors of the fair phases (pre-fair, fair and post-fair) and the effectiveness in the participation of Venezuela in international tourism fairs, from the perspective of the private tourism sector.
Starting from the premise that the variables of the fair planning construct are related to the variables of the fair effectiveness construct, descriptive and correlation statistics (Pearson’s r) are applied, requiring two questionnaires on the Likert scale, in five levels: the first instrument, referring to planning, with an assignment of 1 (no incidence) and 5 (very high incidence), and the second instrument, relative to effectiveness, with a scale of 1 (no effectiveness) and 5 (very high effectiveness). The results indicate that the association of the variables inherent to the planning stages with the variables that indicate effectiveness in participation, show that out of the 31 planning variables, 26 are associated with obtaining a successful participation, stated in 14 variables of effectiveness.