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Saludos
Amigos! Fly Air Highways to the Americas, North,
South and Central
by
Jerry
W. Bird
Our office
received some interesting material on the
Vancouver Institute for the Americas, which
works on trade agreements, cultural ties and
business ventures with Latin America, just as we've
been doing for Africa as official publishers for
the last 8 years. We'll be featuring VIA's concept
in our magazines and web sites soon. As they say,
385 million poeple speak Spanish worldwide and
another 200 million speak Portuguese. Looks like I
will have to find my first Spanish reader from high
school , "De
Todo Un Poco
- a little bit of everything. For now the web site
is http://www.via.bc.ca
When Canada
hosted both the World Ecotourism and the
Summit of the Americas in
historic
Quebec City,
we coveried both events in detail for our
ECOTOURISM
SHOWCASE 2003 EDITION.
Our
Editorial Board Chairman, the late Joe Whitehead,
and former publisher of the Journal of Commerce,
believed in extended follow through on key events.
We carry on that great tradition. About the
Americas. The 34 democratically elected heads of
government from North, Central
and South America
and the Caribbean
gathered in historic Québec City for the
Third Summit of the Americas. At the Summit,
leaders addressed common hemispheric challenges,
including economic integration, improved access to
education, poverty alleviation, enhanced respect
for human rights and democratic
development.
Canada's
Role: Canada was chosen to host the Summit at
the 1998 Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile.
Over 9000 rooms were reserved by the organization
to accommodate the partici -pants, escorts and
media representatives. The Summit is an
extraordinary window for our local tourist
industry.
Other
Features: In North America, our team launched
Air Highways Magazine in 1996 to celebrate the
landmark USA -CANADA OPEN SKIES Air Agreement and
the continent's entry into NAFTA. Our second
mandate was to showcase the National Airports plan
that was sweeping Canada, setting the stage for
overnight changes at local and regional airports.
We laid the groundwork well in advance consulting
with top management at Transport Canada and getting
to know several dozen Airport Managers, who were
the key to our plan for input and later
distribution of magazines at their terminals and in
flight
At the time
our editorial content focused on 40 regional
gateways in the US Pacific Northwest and British
Columbia, mainly on an inbound basis. We covered
scheduled and charter carriers, seaplanes, business
jets and the popular helicopter airline that serves
Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle. Then, within
months we were given the mandate to produce a
magazine on travel to Africa in partnership with
the African Travel Association, a 25 year old
nonprofit organization, whose offices are across
from the Empire State Building on New York's Fifth
Avenue.
It has been
a wonderful marriage and has broadened our
prospective on travel to such exotic destinations
as Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Mali,
Nigeria, Uganda, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania,
Morocco and South Africa. These countries were
either hosts of ATA events or stopovers en
route.
Two
years later, thanks to Joe Whitehead, we launched
our first "Apec-Asia Pacific" edition to
celebrate the Apec Summit (of 18 world economies)
that was held at the Vancouver Convention Centre, a
few blocks away from our Gastown office. This year
Air Highways coverage expands to the entire
hemisphere. with our "Summit of the Americas"
Edition of Air Highways. Rather than publish in
advance of the event, we will do a major follow up
edition, summarizing the results and looking upon
it as a 'roadmap' to the future.
While we
have an abundance of travel and tourism related
items on Canada and a growing number of US
features, our coverage will soon include Mexico,
Central America, the Caribbean and South
America.
Watch
for many new items in these areas.
We invite
individuals from various cities and countries to
send tourism related items for release on this web
site and in our Aviation and Travel magazines.
E-mail: airhwy@dowco.com
Maps, photos and logo
graphics courtesy of Summit of the
Americas.
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