São Paulo – Starting this month, the clients of Nascimento Turismo travelling to the Middle East and North Africa will have the support of a call center to deal with emergency issues. The operators will speak Portuguese, to communicate with the tourists, and Arabic, to solve, in the local language, the problems presented.
“The passenger arrives at the airport and can’t find the person holding his name for transfer services. He will call [the call center] and we will find the person”, says Cleiton Feijó, business director of the tour operator, when explaining how the service works. Another example mentioned by him is when the hotel staff can’t find the name of the client on the reservation list. “The person [the call center operator] will speak with the hotel staff in their native language and explain your reservation so you can check-in”, says the director.
It can sound like simple issues, but the tourist services of Nascimento Turismo, currently operating in Portuguese, English and Spanish, receives, on average, 90 calls per month during the off-season and 150 monthly calls in high season.
The expansion in the number of languages in which the call center’s attendants can offer services is the result of a partnership with the Spanish company Travel Help, specialized in advising and logistics support by phone. The Spanish company’s staff is prepared to attend in six languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Italian and French.
“We detected the opportunity to offer a more complete benefit”, says Feijó, about the addition of new languages in tourist support. The staff of the call center is based in Spain, but the tourist will have a number in Brazil to call and will speak in Portuguese with the operator, who, using the tourist location, will work for the demand to be solved by another attendant that speaks the local language of the destination.
“The most important thing is for the tourist to have support in his trip”, emphasizes Feijó. According to the director, tourists feel more at ease and secure during the trip with a support service. “We receive occurrences daily. Our mission is for him (the tourist) to be able to relax”, he says.
The multi-lingual phone service will be implemented for customers of Nascimento Turismo after Carnival. The phone number will be based in São Paulo and, from anywhere in the world, tourists who use the service will pay the cost of a phone call to Brazil.
“The average waiting time [for the service] is three seconds. The team is large and they already operate for other international companies”, says Feijó. In case they can’t pick up an occurrence immediately, the operator asks for the tourist’s mobile number and returns the call to indicate the procedures to be taken.
According to Feijó, when the service starts to operate, the contact number will be made available in all the tour operator’s travel vouchers and also for the approximately 3,200 agencies that work with them in Brazil.
The director says that, currently, Nascimento sends more than 100,000 passengers to domestic and international destinations. For Arab countries, the tour operator offers packages to the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco.
Feijó explains that the Arab countries are considered as exotic destinations, a title that also includes other places. The exotic places receive 2.5% of the total passengers attended by Nascimento in the year. Among the Arab countries, the UAE and Morocco are the ones most sought by the tourists.
Founded in 1961, Nascimento Turismo works with partner agencies all around Brazil, besides 10 offices of their own that deals tour packages. Five of them are located in São Paulo and the others in Santos and Sorocaba (São Paulo state), Belo Horizonte, Brasília and Rio de Janeiro.
To know more about the tour packages offered by Nascimento Turismo, visit their website at www.nascimento.com.br
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
