Starting today, it will be easier to travel to the Coffee Triangle

Arriving in the Coffee Triangle, in the heart of Colombia, will be easier to do as of this Wednesday, after the launching of the portal www.triangulodelcafe.travel, the most up-to-date tool for international promotion in the entire region.

The new portal, prepared by PROCOLOMBIA with the support of a variety of regional institutions, will increase the international exposure of the three provincial departments and foster tourism by foreign visitors, whose numbers have been increasing throughout the past five years.

The entire portal has been designed in English and Spanish, seeking to inspire tourists to become interested in the region as a destination for their next trips. It is loaded with photographical content and panoramic, 360o images connected to Google Earth for visitors to have precise information on the location of the tourist attraction.

The portal has over 20 pages full of useful information, a travel planner with a broad directory of airlines, hotel-farms, coffee growing farms, hotels and tourist plans. Everything in one place.

The content of the portal has been geo-positioned on Google Maps, a tool that provides directions to arrive in each place, and the weather forecast for the following three days, therefore tourists will be able to better prepare their trips to the Colombian coffee growing region.

More international tourists

According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism, a total of 32,536 foreign tourists chose the Coffee Triangle in 2010 as their holiday destination.

This represented a growth of 9.2% with respect to 2009, when 29,798 foreign visitors were reported to have chosen the region.

Said statistics have ranked the region as the eighth most visited destination as reported by foreign travelers in Colombia, with a 2.2% share over the total arrivals of foreign tourists into the country, and a growth index surpassing that of Bogotá and Bolívar, which registered a variation between 2009 and 2010.

The United States leads the charts of tourists' countries of origin with a 42.3% share, followed by Spain and Venezuela with 15.3 and 5.9 percent accordingly.

Nonetheless, Mexican and French tourists reported the highest growth rates during the past year. While 858 tourists arrived from Mexico in 2009, the number in 2010 reached 1,181, a positive variation of 37.6 percent. During the same period of time, the number of Frenchmen who visited the Coffee Triangle went from 602 to 716, with a growth of 18.9%.

This is due, in part, to the work carried out by PROCOLOMBIA during the past years to position the country as a world-class tourist destination. The provincial departments comprising the Coffee Triangle (Risaralda, Quindio and Caldas) have been observed to provide a supplementary tourist offer, hence the regional strategy that was designed to involve them all.
 
The region has shown enormous potential in ecotourism, nature, adventure, bird watching and the coffee culture, especially highlighting the Ruta del Cafe (The Coffee Trail).

There are also very interesting opportunities in corporate tourism, thus efforts have been concentrated on the strengthening of golf packages, congresses and conventions.