The Small Medellin Tour Operator That Knows the Importance of TripAdvisor
Photo Credit: Colombia Travel Operator co-founder and CEO Julio Casadiego (right). Skift / Daniel Peltier
Skift Take
Tour operators in Colombia face some of the same problems as travel startups and small companies around the world: How do you get the word out? TripAdvisor is a huge influence on their prospective customers.
Julio Casadiego, co-founder and CEO of the Medellin, Colombia-based tour operator, Colombia Travel Operator, is focused on transformation -- in more ways than one.
The tour that the company's website calls the "Do Not Say That Name Tour" takes travelers to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's grave; to the site of an Escobar penthouse in the Monaco building that was bombed by the Cali cartel in 1988, and to various neighborhoods in a city that hardly resembles the one that in 1990 was the murder capital of the world.
In 2014, the company handled some 1,500 tourists and this transformation-of-the-city tour was a keen point of interest.
"We show them how Medellin passed from fear to hope because Medellin was the capital of the cartel in the 1980s but now it is the capital of the entrepreneurs and an innovative city," Casadiego says. "You ha
