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TOURISM
Nicaragua wants
to lure tourists
Douglas Hanks III
Fifteen years after the Contras
stopped battling the
Sandinistas, Nicaragua still
finds itself fighting that
notorious war. Not on the
ground, but in the minds of U.S.
travelers who continue to fear
the lush, rustic country just
north of Costa Rica.
''The image of Nicaragua is
either negative or
nonexistent,'' lamented María
Rivas, a former marketing
executive for Coca-Cola and
Nestlé who now serves as
Nicaragua's minister of tourism.
``It's not an easy job.''
But with the help of a Coral
Gables firm and more tax dollars
to fund promotions, Nicaragua
hopes to erase its lingering
war-torn reputation. It has a
new slogan, '' A Country With
Heart,'' to offer distance from
the camouflaged Marxists and
U.S.-backed rebels that
Americans saw on their
television screens throughout
the 1980s.
On a recent trip to New York,
Rivas' staff handed travel
writers crime statistics that
put Nicaragua second only to
Canada among the safest
countries in the Western
Hemisphere. Instead of Cold War
history, Nicaragua has made its
colonial past a big part of its
new marketing campaign, which
emphasizes 16th-century Spanish
architecture.
Even Bianca Jagger may get into
the act. The ex-Rolling Stone
spouse is one of several famous
Nicaraguans -- including ''Bond
girl'' Barbara Carrera and
former Baltimore Oriole Dennis
Martinez -- the country hopes
will remind Americans that
Nicaragua isn't such a strange
land.
''It creates a sense of
familiarity among Americans with
the people of Nicaragua,'' said
Beth Nelson, a partner at PPR
Communications, the Coral Gables
firm Nicaragua hired to run its
tourism campaign. ``Our whole
focus is on educating Americans
about the country and about the
people.''
Nicaragua's emotional appeal to
travelers as a place with heart
in some ways mirrors the
campaign El Salvador waged
earlier this decade to woo
foreign investors. Even though
that country's civil war ended
in 1992, it weighed on the minds
of U.S. business executives.
''All the research seemed to
point out that people had a high
awareness of the country, but
for the wrong reasons,'' said
Rissig Licha, Fleishman Hillard
executive who ran the El
Salvador account for the firm's
Coral Gables office. So
Fleishman Hillard pushed a new
slogan that focused on the
country's reputation for
diligence: ``El Salvador
Works.''
''Notwithstanding the war,''
Licha said, ``people gave the
Salvadoreans credit for being
hard workers.''
But aside from its Cold War
notoriety, Nicaragua faces other
challenges in the increasingly
competitive Latin American
travel market. The country
boasts expansive rain forest
canopies, but Costa Rica already
dominates the so-called
''ecotourism'' niche for Central
America. Nicaraguans tout their
coffee and beef, but Colombia
and Argentina get most of the
attention on those fronts.
So Nicaragua has assembled a
grab bag of other attractions to
lure visitors: The rare chance
to see fresh water sharks where
a briny river meets Lake
Nicaragua. Orchids growing near
the Nicaraguan volcanoes that
are part of the famous Pacific
''Ring of Fire.'' Mark Twain's
trek across the country in 1866
-- a journey made popular during
the California Gold Rush, when
Nicaragua was seen as the safest
trans-continental route
available.
And for a country known for
sub-par hotels and rough roads,
the campaign touts Nicaragua as
an unspoiled destination.
After coffee and beef prices
took a dive in the 1990s,
Nicaragua began relying on
tourism as the country's No. 1
industry.
Travel to Nicaragua has climbed
in recent years, according to
official figures, from about
500,000 in 2002 to about 600,000
last year. Tourism officials and
travel executives alike describe
Nicaragua as still facing an
uphill battle convincing
Americans to vacation there.
''We do a lot of Costa Rica -- I
mean a lot of Costa Rica,'' said
Sylvia Berman, president of Post
Haste Travel in Hollywood. But
it's been three years since the
travel agency sent someone to
Nicaragua.
Annie Berk, vice president of
Ladatco Tours in Miami, said
Nicaragua's image problems
stretch back even farther than
the 1981-90 civil war, which
ended in the country holding
free elections.
''Prior to the problems in
Central America -- when times
were green and peaceful and all
that stuff, back in the early
70s, Nicaragua was always a poor
stepchild,'' Berk said. ``They
were never on the tourist map,
as Mexico was or as Guatemala
was in those days.''
Now, Berk sees Nicaragua as an
''upstart'' destination still
suffering from sub-par
infrastructure but also making a
slow recovery from past image
problems.
''It's still perceived as
war-torn,'' Berk said. But ``if
everything stays quiet, there's
only one place it can go: up.'' |
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