NEW EXOTISSIMO BROCHURES 2001 TO BE LAUNCHED AT WTM

Exotissimo are launching two new brochures for 2001 at the World Travel Market to be held in London between 13th and 16th November. The Exotissimo 2001 Professional's Guide to Vietnam, Myanmar & Cambodia will be packed with all the useful information needed to make the overseas operator and travel agent's job of selling these exciting destinations that much easier. It will include information on highlights of the countries, hotel descriptions and a wide selection of suggested tour programmes including many new ideas. This year, for the first time all three countries are included in the one brochure and in response to the tremendous growth in the popularity of adventure travel in the region there is a supplementary brochure dedicated to adventure travel called Exotissimo Great Adventures 2001.

The past ten years have seen a huge explosion in interest in adventure travel, and all its off-shoots and one of the fastest growing long-haul regions over the same period has been South East Asia. With these facts in mind Exotissimo decided that the time was right to produce a brochure dedicated solely to adventure travel. Adventure travel is a very general term that encompasses many different forms of travel, but for convenience sake can be divided into three general categories, soft adventure, hard adventure and nature-based tourism or ecotourism. The tour programmes that have been developed for Exotissimo Great Adventures 2001 are a sample of various adventure style tours that Exotissimo have been researching over the past year or two in Vietnam, Myanmar & Cambodia. Essentially these are tours that do not sit easily side by side with the tour programmes featured in the main brochure, the Exotissimo 2001 Travel Professional's Guide to Vietnam, Myanmar & Cambodia. These programmes contain examples of all three categories of adventure travel mentioned above, i.e. soft adventure, hard adventure and nature-based tourism.

Some fit neatly into these categories but others may not seem like obvious examples of adventure travel. While, for example, climbing Vietnam's Mount Fan Si Pan would be considered hard adventure and birdwatching in Myanmar would undoubtedly fall into the nature-based tourism category some of the sample tours featured have been included because they contain some travel that could be considered "hard going" or accommodation that could be considered rather basic.