As part of our continuing education program at the school of business & economics at Francisco Marroquin University, we developed a 7-day study tour in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The program is tailored for engineering, marketing, and entrepreneurship students, and focuses on technology and innovation. The tour combines an academic component (company tours, university visits, conferences, etc.) and a tourism component (city tours, museums, etc.).
To launch the program, we needed a Guatemala tourism liaison that could facilitate travel-related services in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. For this, we contracted the services of DMC Guatemala. Not only did they make the coordination process so much easier and worry-free for us, but they exceeded our expectations. Some of the services DMC Guatemala administers are the following:
• Procured lodging, transportation, and dining services through San Francisco and Silicon Valley operators.
• Presented multiple lodging, transportation, and dining options so we could evaluate the best opportunities available for our group.
• Prepared sample itineraries and detailed pricing analyses for our review, while adapting a program around our time-frame and budget.
• Facilitated point of sale & merchant services, managed funds, and made payments to U.S. suppliers.
• Ensured that all services provided by suppliers were executed accordingly.
The tour has been such a success that we now run this program every year! We owe much of the success of this program to our partnership with DMC Guatemala!
Alexandra Bihr
Entrepreneurship Coordinator
School of Business and Economics
Universidad Francisco Marroquin
http://fce.ufm.edu/