Asociación civil generación Par – La red de Turismo Responsable

Placement organization

Name of organization: Asociación civil generación Par – La red de Turismo Responsable
Town/city: Buenos Aires
Country: Argentinië
Website: http://www.reddeturismoresponsable.org/

Student

Name of student: Marisa Slootweg

Specialist area: ITMC
Placement period: 2013-2014

Information about placement organization

Type of organization: NGO
Organization’s activities: La Red de Turismo Responsable (RTR) is an NGO that is promoting responsible and sustainable tourism in South America. This is done through the members, thus, the RTR consists of a number of members who are all involved in the sustainable and responsible tourism sector. Think of the hotel industry, travel agencies, tour operators, the government, academies and much more. These members are from all over Argentina and Uruguay. Together with these members the RTR thinks about new concepts of what responsible travel is, they organize events related to sustainable and responsible tourism, they work together with universities to implement the concept of sustainability, they work together with different organisation to launch projects about sustainable and responsible travel, they attend fairs to promote sustainability, they attend international meetings to promote their ideas and much more.
Target group of the organization: Responsible travelers and responsible/sustainable organisations/companies/institution/etc
Company culture: The company culture is very open and relaxed. The atmosphere is very friendly and informal. Argentinian people like to talk and have small talks, so also at the office. The office is not really big so you can easily talk to each other and ask each other questions. For me this informal way of working was really nice as it was really easy to feel comfortable and accepted. Also during meetings the atmosphere was open, friendly and not that formal, which was very nice.
Number of employees: 3
Dress code: casual
Did the organization meet the agreements you made beforehand? yes

Information about your placement

In which department(s) are you working? Within RTR there are different nodes which are for example: Buenos Aires, Rosario and Córdoba. These different nodes consist of the different members of the RTR and all have their president who represents all the members of that particular node, in the council representation. Above the council of representatives, the board of directors can be found which consist of the executive secretary (this is the place where I as working for this placement). This executive secretary is divided in four commissions which are promotion, press and communication, education and public influences. I was working the commission for promotion and the commission for education.
Brief description of your daily activities: As I already told, I was working for two commissions, which were the commission of promotion and the commission of education. This meant that I had to do tasks related to education as well as promotion. This made the work more interesting as I was doing different things every time. One of the things I was doing was for example organizing a contest for universities where students could hand in a project about a sustainable plan they made. Furthermore, I have been busy with doing research on how we could implement booking.com in our website (this was for our members in the hotel sector), I have been doing research on how the RTR could improve their marketing, I have been in contact with a lot of travel guides to get our different members in their books (this was for the tour operators, travel agencies and hotels). These are just some big tasks, I have also done a lot of smaller tasks such as emailing people, translating documents and reviewing documents about sustainability. Overall, the tasks were all very different from each other which made it more interesting as I could learn something different from every task.
Brief description of your company assignment: My company assignment consisted of two parts as I was working for two commissions within the RTR. The first part was for the commission of education. I had to evaluate the current initiatives and design an action program for the RTR. This means that first I needed to have a look at the initiatives that were already made in regards to the commission of education. With these initiatives I had to think of actions the members of the RTR could undertake in order to actually perform the initiatives. The other part of the assignment was for the commission of promotion. For this part of the company assignment I again needed to evaluate the current initiatives and from these outcomes make a marketing plan for the members of the RTR. I had to look up what the RTR already thought of, what they were planning on doing and in the end I needed to think of actions, thus a plan, they can undertake to successfully perform their ideas.
Comment briefly on your supervision by the organization: The supervision is very flexible and open. You work in the same office as your supervisor and when you have a question you can directly ask it. You can also ask him any question you want. I highly recommend it to ask as much questions as possible, as you learn the most from this. When the supervisor is not there you can always reach him via whatsapp or the chat in gmail. You can plan your own days, so you can say yourself whenever you want to work on your placement assignments. Overall, the supervision is very flexible and good. You get the feeling that the supervisor really cares about your well being.

Requirements for students on placement

What kind of personal skills are required for this placement? Sociable, flexible, stress-proof, open to new things, prepared to speak in a different language (so not Dutch or English)
Additional company requirements for this placement? MS office, google docs, dropbox, working online with google, hangout
English: Intermediate
Spanish: Advanced
French: Basic
German: Basic
Italian: Basic
Other languages:

The trip

Mode of transport to reach your destination: Airplane

Accommodation

How did you arrange your accommodation? By myself on the internet
How did you go to work every day? First I always went by public transport but after I moved I went by foot

Visa / work permit / vaccinations

Do you need a visa? Yes, but only a tourist visa. You don’t need to do anything for this. You will get a stamp for 90 days when you arrive at the airport.
Do you need a work permit? No
How did you arrange the necessary documents: I did not have to arrange any documents before coming to Buenos Aires
How much time did it take to arrange the necessary documents? —
Did you need certain vaccinations? No
How long in advance? —

Language course

Did you take a language course before you started your placement? No
Would you recommend to have a language course prior to this placement? Yes, I would highly recommend a language course if your Spanish is not yet on a good level. The Spanish in Argentina is very different from the Spanish we learn a the NHTV and it takes a while to get used to this. Therefore, if you have only had Spanish at the NHTV I would highly recommend you to take a language course. It will help you a lot!

The costs in euros

Travelling expenses (e.g. return ticket): € around €1200,-
Accommodation (monthly): € €275,-
Local transport (monthly): € €20,-
General costs of living (monthly): € I am not sure because I did not really keep track of this, but it was quite a lot because I went out for dinner and shows a lot. So around €600,-
Costs of visa: € After 90 days you have to extend your visa. This will cost about €30,-
Costs of work permit: € €0,-
What did the company pay for/to you? I did not get a financial compensation during my placement. However, when we had to go to meetings or anything else work related outside the city, or a far drive by taxi, this was being paid by the RTR.

Culture

How did you prepare for the country’s culture?
I started quite late with preparing as I was on exchange before my placement. However, I tried to look things up on the internet and I bought a book about the culture of Argentina. From this book I learned the most basic things so I would not be that shocked about the differences. This was nice in the beginning but after a while I learned that the culture goes so much deeper than is explained in that book. But it was a good book to survive the first days/weeks. However, in my opinion, that the best way to learn a culture is to be part of that culture. Of course it is good to prepare yourself a little bit (know about the important people of Argentina, important happenings etc.) so you know what the people are talking about. Still, the best way to learn about the culture is to be surrounded by Argentinian people.
Did the culture of the country influence your performance during the placement in any way? Not really, it is fairly easy to adapt to the Argentinian culture if you are a bit open minded. They are very friendly and open people.

Future students on placement

Future students are free to contact me for further information: Yes
My e-mail address: mariza_93@live.nl

Other information

Recommendations on what to do and what not to do: Be open to all the people, try to talk to them in Spanish and show them that you like the city and show interested in the Argentinian culture. They will like this. Try all the Argentinian food, it is very good! Go explore the city but also the villages outside the city. Try to make as much trips to other parts of Argentina as possible. You will learn that Buenos Aires is so different from the rest of the Argentina and that Argentina has so much more to offer than only Buenos Aires.

Do not walk around with all your valuable things. There are a lot of robbers and they especially like the European people. When you have dollars or euros, do not show this. The people in Buenos Aires associate this with being very rich, so the change to get robbed will be a lot higher. Just be very careful with your stuff and always keep an eye on it. Also when people ask you to put it down or anything, do not do this. Even if they seem really nice people, do not trust them! However, if you just keep an eye open all the time everything will be fine.

But overall, just enjoy this amazing city! You will be having days that you hate the size, but in the end you will love the endless possibilities this city has to over you!
Leisure possibilities in the city/surroundings of where the placement took place: There are enough leisure possibilities in Buenos Aires. This city is huge! Which means that there is always something to do (and if there is nothing to do the people in Buenos Aires make sure there is something spectacular, such as huge demonstrations, happening). The whole city is overloaded with extremely nice, good and cheap restaurants. Everywhere you go you can find bars and there are loads of culture activities to do. There are lots of different neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, which makes it even more interesting. There is one thing you can be sure of, and that is that Buenos Aires will never bore you.

Media

Youtube link Youtube placement video link