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ITAS delegates visit Ivory Coast & Senegal

coast until someone else made a start, SIETHO has been busy priming the pump. Since it was founded in 1961, the Ste. Ivoirienne d'Expansion Touristique et Hoteliere has been building or managing hotels. It now runs a chain of hotels of 30 to 50 air-conditioned rooms with shower or bath, restaurants and swimming pools in most inland towns.
  Thus tours can now include Daloa, Gagnoa, Korhogo, and Man. (There are several private hotels in Bouake.) In the Comroe National Park it runs a camp and, for tourists who want to live like the Ivorians, a village of modernized huts at Gouessesso. Along the coast, it has a small hotel at San Pedro, and a far larger one under construction, with another going up at Jacqueville.
  But the most ambitious projects have been in Assinie, a long strip of land surrounded by sea and lagoon, some two hours from Abidjan. Here, it put up a vacation village of 400 beds (and 200 more to come) in some 200 air-conditioned bungalows, with restaurants, game areas and swimming pool. The management was entrusted to Club Mediterannee, which ensured that it was fully booked last holiday season, during the European winter of 1971-72. Nearby is a smaller village. And SIETHO is now working on Assinie II, with 300 beds, for ICTA and other travel agencies. 
  But Abidjan will remain the major tourist center as well as a Mecca for international organizations, many of which have their regional headquarters there. This, if anywhere in West Africa, is an ideal site for hosting major conferences and conventions, and in 1969 a remarkable start was made with SKAL Club International. So there will be a conference center at the Hotel Ivoire and ultimately an international convention center in the Riviera.
  Unlike the coast and interior, the Abidjan region will be left open very largely for private, often foreign investment. Less effort will be necessary to keep up the expansion in hotels, restaurants and travel agencies run by individuals or large companies like Moshe Mayer's Israeli Mafit group, or the French (including many "pieds noirs" from Algeria). For the tourist trade with the money is becoming aware of the Ivory Coast.
  Much of the future expansion, it is assumed, will occur between Cocody and Bingerville, just 10 minutes from the airport with the future expressway. This area, called the "African Riviera," is the site of a planned garden city of 200,000, including an international hotel center.

[[image - black & white photographs of Delegate members attending 1972 convention]]

[[caption]] These pictures were taken by "Delegate" Magazine's roving reporter with a Ricoh 401 S.L. Camera. The pictures show activtes [[activities]] engaged in by Delegates attending the 1972 Convention of the Inter-American Travel agents in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast and Dakar, Senegal. [[/caption]]