The Tourism Industry is reinventing itself in front of a world that finds itself in a totally different scenario from the one we were used to. There is much uncertainty and questions about what this “new normal” will be like after the pandemic. For the industries that have been completely paralyzed, specifically for Tourism, the main challenge is to work on a redesign of their products and promotion and marketing strategies, in a collaborative and associative way between companies and public entities.

In this regard, we reaffirm the fact that Europe is ahead of us. While we in Chile are just beginning the implementation of the deconfinement plan -step by step-  and we are preparing the Tourism Industry with protocols that have begun to be disseminated, Europe has already implemented them and has advanced in their adaptation to the reality of each sector and territory to save the European summer.

As Eurochile we have closely followed what is happening in Tourism in Europe. We have seen that the “new normal” requires hard work and efforts of coordination and balance between the public and private, and between the territories that integrate a tourist destination to provide guarantees and security to the tourist who will visit the destination. For this, it is essential that from the business sector there are speakers who represent them in the instances of coordination with the public sector, to specify and implement in an organized way the support, product design, promotion and marketing strategies.

The areas of Europe that have managed to save part of the European summer, and to reactivate themselves to a certain extent, have done so based on the principles of associativity, union and coordinated work between public and private sectors. This is the case, for example, of Asturias in Spain, specifically the Clúster de Turismo Rural of Asturias, which faced with the need to save their businesses, entrepreneurs joined even more, took advantage of training and improving their management. They were organised and coordinated with the municipalities to support each other in financial, promotional and advertising matters and in the creation and redesign of products. Their reactivation strategy was not based on prices, because they had costs to pay to implement the protocols, security measures, etc. Its promotion strategy has been aimed at motivating tourists to go to Asturias to reinvent themselves, to renew themselves together with nature and, they have focused on family groups, being flexible in canceling reservations. All the promotion has been done digitally, and they have done the same with brochures, maps, etc. They lived through a

moment of total uncertainty, just as Chile has been living, but there was a single voice, a single speaker who represented them, managing to put problems in common to solve them jointly.

Currently, in Chile we are still living a stage of uncertainty, especially in the economic sphere, and knowing and learning from the experiences of companies and destinations that have already gone through the same thing and have managed to advance in their reactivation, motivates us. It is reaffirmed that associativity and public-private bonds are key to getting out of the crisis. It is impossible for an entrepreneur to promote himself only in one market, and less now; the entrepreneur must be part of a destination, and all the actors of that tourist destination must be promoted and sold as one. You must cooperate without competing to create and develop a tourist destination.