Although I am currently in the UK, not very far form London (in Cambridge) and with the inscription as a visitor done months ago, finally I cannot attend to the WTM 2011 as I expected. However, I try to keep in touch with what has happened there so far and I decided to share it with all of you. I hope you find it useful or, at least interesting.

The World Travel Market is, together with FITUR (held in Madrid in January) and ITB (in Berlin, in March) one of the most important travel & tourism fairs in the World, and it is the place you don’t want to miss if you want to be aware of what’s going on in the field of international tourism.

Public and institutional relations are important in the three tourism fairs mentioned above, but WTM also has an important professional component and always interesting conferences and venues.

In the following video you can see the highlights of 2011 edition

As far as the figures about tourism in Europe is concerned, in a conference of the UNWTO sponsorized by the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC held this morning, these are the figures given:

• International touris arrivals grew 4.5% until august 2011, to reach 671 million, 29 million more than the same period of last year.
• Despite the current economic uncertainty, Europe showed a growth of 7% in touris arrivals (although part of this growth in Southern European destinations is due to the shift of travel away from the Middle East and North Africa).
• International tourism is proving to be an important economic driver for many European economies, bringing foreign exchange and helping to ease the pressure of their balance of payments.
• Growth will soften in the rest of the current year, with a projected final figure at the end of the year of a 4% increase in international tourist arrivals, beig the projection for the year 2012 a growth in the range of 3% to 4%.

 UNWTO Secretary General Taleb Rifai, said that «UNWTO encourages European Governments to support tourism and consider the sector as one that can back economic recovery given its capacity to distribute wealth abd create jobs across the region».