September 2007

The Travel Bug - Issue 31

SPF40 - The 3rd Annual South Pacific Fest

It is coming close to that time of the year again when the South Pacific meets the US in the 3rd annual SPF40 to be held in Long Beach, California, from 20-22 September. The 3-days conference is focused on educating travel agents, tour operators, reservation staff and media on the South Pacific destinations. These destinations include Cook Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and Vanuatu. The program consists of a travel agent training event, a mini trade show, reservation staff training and a media event. Under each country participating, a selected number of suppliers are also invited to present, promote and sell their specific products.

This year’s event is once again organized by Mvent Group in collaboration with the SPF40 Organizing Committee, which consist mainly of South Pacific NTO reps based in the US. The event is sponsored by the participating NTOs as well as certain corporate sponsors, which include Air Tahiti Nui, Air New Zealand, Air Pacific, Bridal Media, Questex Media and south-pacific.travel. south-pacific.travel works closely with the SPF40 Organizing Committee and will be represented at this year’s event. For more information, check the SPF40 website http://www.spf40.com/

Pacific Blue Airline to Expand in Pacific

The Australian-based airline, Pacific Blue, says it would like to expand its services to other Pacific countries. Pacific Blue currently serves Tonga, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands and Fiji, and in its venture with Polynesian Blue it flies to Samoa. Pacific Blue’s commercial general manager Adrian Hamilton-Manns says expanding into places like the Northern Marianas and Kiribati would boost their economies. “Because we’d promote personal tourism and travel to those islands we’d like to service the Pacific Island communities, obviously in a profitable sense, and to be able to do it economically so we can bring low fares but also to obviously encourage the trader and the travel between” (Source: Radio New Zealand News 23 August 2007)

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