The Costa del Sol has been awarded as the best European golf destination by the International Association of Golf Tour Operators (IAGTO), an association to which 2,716 golf tour operators belong, controlling more than 87% of the golf vacation packages sold worldwide and billing more than 2.1 billion euros a year, golf resorts, hotels, golf courses, incoming operators, airlines, tourist offices and commercial partners in a total of 105 countries.
The president of Turismo Costa del Sol, Elías Bendodo, has expressed his gratitude for the recognition granted by the main actors of the international tourism industry, being an honor for us to receive an award of such an important magnitude from the International Association of Golf Tour Operators.
The recognition of the Costa del Sol as the best European golf destination of the year reaffirms our leadership in the segment at national and international level, throughout the year, backed by an offer of more than 70 courses, almost 70% of those existing in Andalusia, as indicated Bendodo.
This is a segment to which Turismo Costa del Sol has been paying special attention for several years, following a strategic line marked by the objective of achieving an optimal management of seasonality and that now, thanks to this award, receives a great boost to continue its development. From Turismo Costa del Sol we will continue working on it thanks to the quantity and quality of its sports infrastructure, coupled with the magnificent connectivity and multitude of complementary services offered by the destination, added the president of the entity.
The recognition has an important weight in the tourism panorama taking into consideration that those responsible for assigning it have been the tour operators themselves, who are backed by a long professional career and have an important knowledge of the sector and of the Costa del Sol’s competing destinations.
The award was announced during the awards ceremony of the gala dinner with more than 600 congressmen that the IAGTO has organized within the framework of the International Golf Travel Market (IGTM), fair founded by the association, which this year was held from October 15 to 18 in Slovenia and in which the Costa del Sol is present exhibiting its offer in the golf segment.
The association rewards each year through this ceremony the outstanding achievements of many emerging golf destinations and individual golf resorts thus furthering the achievement of its primary goal: to raise the segment’s standards throughout the industry and help destinations position themselves to not only attract more business, but to achieve the best possible experience for the visiting golf traveler.
IAGTO strives to provide information and create opportunities that help its members develop their business faster, with less effort and at lower cost, according to the association’s founder and executive director, Peter Walton.
The Costa del Sol thus puts the finishing touch to its participation in IGTM, one of the most internationally recognized golf industry events that brings together each year a total of 1,300 golf travel industry professionals from over 65 countries, including some 500 tourism suppliers in the sector, more than 400 golf tour operators that collectively control 80% of the global market for this segment of tourism and about 100 international journalists and whose direct and indirect economic impact of spending by golf tourists in the destination amounts to 1,410 million euros.
Turismo Costa del Sol has carried out during the fair the promotion of the destination in international markets through various activities and networking days developing face-to-face meetings with the most important international tour operators who have attended the fair.
The entity also organized The Night with Friends of the Costa del Sol on October 14, bringing together representatives of the Costa del Sol’s golf tourism offer who attended the fair with the most important international operators in the sector at a dinner at the Intercontinental Hotel in Ljubljana, where a cocktail was offered, a presentation of the participating companies was made, giving rise to a space for networking and development of future business and a flamenco music and dance show was offered. The Costa del Sol intensified its promotion at the fair thanks to different branding actions in different supports of the fair and IAGTO.
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