June 24th - Why Venezuela is back on travellers' maps
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For many seasoned travellers, Venezuela was the first South American destination, thanks to Viasa's competitive fares from the UK to the wonder-filled continent.
Currently, Venezuela is on the Foreign Office's no-go list. Despite this, travellers from other countries are flocking to the troubled republic bordering Guyana, Brazil, and Colombia.
Blas Fabian from HoverTours in Caracas and Daniel Santin from Inspiring Destinations have been encouraging me to return.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 24th of June and I am at the |
| 0:10.6 | Lata, that's the Latin American Travel Association Expo 2024, a great celebration that everything |
| 0:18.0 | from the Rio Grande to the southern tip of South America has to |
| 0:23.8 | offer. One thing that South America hasn't been offering really for some time is the wonderful |
| 0:31.0 | country of Venezuela, a place I used to travel to very often in the 1990s and also in the early 2000s. But it's been largely off |
| 0:41.9 | limits. There's a big do not go warning from the foreign office at the moment, also the US State |
| 0:47.1 | Department. But can you actually travel there? Should you actually travel there? The two gentlemen |
| 0:53.8 | who can tell me are Blas Fabian, |
| 0:56.7 | he is the tour operator at Hover Tours, interesting name, which specialises in Venezuela as well as |
| 1:03.9 | Panama and Costa Rica, and Daniel Santin, who is inspiring destinations, who works with Blast to promote Venezuela. |
| 1:13.7 | Gentlemen, let's start with you, Blasts. |
| 1:15.9 | What is the situation like in Venezuela? |
| 1:18.2 | We just hear that it is very, very unstable, lots of crime, not a place to be on vacation. |
| 1:24.2 | My company, Hover, Tour, has 30 years old funded. |
| 1:31.6 | Actually, the review of the travelers that we are arriving there are top, top, top experience of the traveling all around |
| 1:39.3 | the country. Venezuela is completely open for tourism all around the country. |
| 1:46.7 | Actually, we are running an operation from Poland. |
| 1:49.8 | Poland? |
| 1:50.5 | Yes, from Poland. |
| 1:52.0 | So this is Polish holiday makers who are going to Venezuela on holiday. |
| 1:56.6 | They are going to Venezuela, and also we are doing round trips all around Venezuela. We are running |
| 2:03.3 | 11 different routes from in Venezuela with the Polish people. Now we are handling people from |
... |
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