Brazilians head for foreign climes in holiday season

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Dec 4 (Reuters) Brazilians are heading abroad in record numbers for the country's peak vacation season, prompted by the combination of a strong local currency and a crisis in the air traffic control system.

Among the Brazilians' top destinations in the first eight months of the year were Argentina, Spain, Chile and United States, according to Brazil's number one travel operator, CVC.

Traditionally popular domestic locations such as Bahia in the northeast are suffering.

Diana Toledo Arruda, a 28-year-old lawyer, recently decided to spend a holiday in Buenos Aires after finding out that it would cost less than 500 dollars.

''A friend told me he had bought a 4-day vacation package to Buenos Aires for 380 dollars and I thought this was really cheap, so I called my mother and we started planning,'' she said.

''The low level of the dollar was the starting point to think about traveling,'' she said. ''For next year, my mother and I are planning a vacation in Peru.'' From January to November, the Brazilian currency, the real, has strengthened about 6.7 per cent, to 2.18 per U S dollar.

International travel at CVC has increased in that time and now represents 20 per cent of total sales, the company said.

''We believe that, because of the currency, international routes will continue to be popular,'' CVC President Guilherme Paulus said in a report.

In 2005, 4.7 million Brazilian tourists traveled abroad, according to the most recent data available from Embratur.

Infraero, the company that controls airport traffic, said that in the first 10 months of the year, 4.5 million passengers -- Brazilians and foreigners -- took international flights.

And Brazilians are not only traveling abroad more but they are also spending more money. Central bank figures show that Brazilians left 4.77 billion dollars outside the country from January to October, up 22 per cent from a year earlier.

Germans are the biggest-spending international tourists, totaling 71 billion dollars in 2004 according to the most recent figures from the U N World Tourism Organization.

(AIR CHAOS) Travel choices have also been affected by a crisis in Brazil's air traffic control crisis that have snarled domestic flights after an air disaster in September.

Control operators in Brasilia, the system's hub, complained of overlong hours and reduced their schedules after a passenger plane belonging to Brazil's Gol airlines crashed over the Amazon, killing all 154 people aboard. It had clipped wings with an executive jet flying in the other direction.

Since the work slowdown started, airlines have registered delays up to 8 hours on departures from Brazilian airports.

Sales of domestic tourist packages for December -- a high season period in Brazil because of school vacations --fell 8 per cent, according to the Brazilian Association of Travel Agencies.

''If this doubt continues, sales can fall more, since we haven't felt all the effects of the air crisis,'' said Eduardo Nascimento, vice-president of the association.

The action did not affect international travel, he said, because most flights are at night, when there are fewer flights overall and controllers can handle the load. People traveling from Brazil's southeast to the north and northeast are most affected by the slowdown.

''Hotels in Salvador (Bahia) have signaled the cancellation of events and seminars on the end of the year,'' said Claudio Tabuada, president of Bahiatursa, a state tourism company.

Bahiatursa had expected the flow of visitors to grow 8 percent during December and now predicts an increase of 6 per cent because of the air control crisis.

REUTERS LL BS0844