Puerto Rico has launched an ad campaign to promote the Caribbean island as a prime destination for vacationers from the continental United States, source of 90 percent of the island’s visitors, with a special focus on winning the growing Latino market. “U.S. Latinos are more and more important as tourists,” the new executive director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, Mario González Lafuente, told Efe. He said the increase in airline connections between American cities and Puerto Rico will help attract more Latinos to the Caribbean island’s beaches and towns.
Budget airline JetBlue announced last week that it plans to operate more than 30 flights a day to and from Puerto Rico, which will mean more than 20 departures daily out of San Juan. The director of the state agency said that to promote the double goal of winning more U.S. tourists and specifically the Latino market segment, a campaign with the slogan “Discover why Puerto Rico does it better” is currently being launched in the principal U.S. cities.
The campaign, with a budget of $20 million, includes ads in the different media, but with special emphasis on digital. “We’re boosting our use of digital media, in line with today’s global trends,” González Lafuente said. The director said that promoting Puerto Rico includes airing ads on shows in the United States with national T.V. coverage like “The Today Show” and “Good Morning America.”
“The strategy is to give the island a unique identity within the Caribbean, and even the world, stressing facets like its history, culture, beaches, ecotourism, gastronomy and it proximity to the United States – no passport needed,” he said. González Lafuente noted that tourism is key to Puerto Rico’s economic growth, providing employment for more than 62,000 people and bringing in $3.6 billion annually.
The director said that his goal in running the company is to boost annual revenues from tourism in Puerto Rico to $5.6 billion by the year 2015. He recalled that in the last year Puerto Rico has had a 33 percent increase in the number of passengers boarding in San Juan, making the island’s capital the hub of the Caribbean.
The Puerto Rico Tourism Company also plans to increase the quality and quantity of attractions, increasing the number of hotels, promoting green tourism, and forging alliances with state and federal agencies to help spread the word about Puerto Rico abroad.
Other projects include improving air and sea access to the island, modernizing transport infrastructures and decentralizing tourism outside the San Juan metropolitan area.

For the original report from EFE go to http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=370733&CategoryId=14092