The agreement, which was finalized during the III International MICE Congress - EXPOMICE as a collaboration between FENALCO, the Tourism & Society Think Tank and Ostelea; will deliver 50 scholarships to professionals linked to the trade guild. Additionally, 20 partial scholarships will be offered to facilitate access to an online or hybrid master's degree.
For Jaime Alberto Cabal, president of FENALCO, this agreement ratifies FENALCO's commitment to MICE tourism. The country has all the possibilities to become the first choice as a destination for meetings, congresses and conventions, hence the importance of training and professionalizing more Colombians in this segment that will surely continue to grow.
For his part, Antonio Santos del Valle, president of TSTT, highlighted the importance of collaboration between important institutions such as FENALCO and Ostelea to respond to the training needs of MICE tourism professionals and the entire tourism value chain, and how training can improve the job skills of professionals in the tourism sector.
He also commented that tourism professionals need to be constantly updated in knowledge and skills, allowing them to be more resilient in such a changing ecosystem.
Finally, Andrés Javier Rodríguez, Ostelea's Director of Liaison with Companies and Institutions, stated that "Ostelea's work consists of collaborating with the development of the tourism sector through the training of its leaders. In the case of FENALCO, seeing its firm commitment to the development of the Colombian MICE sector, we saw clearly from the very first moment that it would be worthwhile to collaborate with its efforts".
Ostelea is part of the Planeta Formación y Universidades group, which has more than 130,000 active students and various universities and business schools in countries such as Spain, France, Italy, the United States and Colombia itself.