On April 6-8, Palau Visitors Authority had once again joined with its local tour operators and hoteliers to form a presence at the Marine Dive Fair, Japan’s largest annual dive show. Coordinators for this fair, who are also in association with 3 of Japan’s major magazines; ‘Marine Diving’ (first and largest Japan dive magazine), ‘Travel Diver' and 'Marine Photo'’ hold this fair to highlight dive destinations and beach resorts from countries like Egypt, Fiji, Maldives, Philippines, Micronesia etc., who attend this show to promote itself as a choice tourist destination to the highly popular Japanese travelers. Total visitors for the 3-day fair showed the biggest number compared to past shows with 49,764 people registered breaking down to 80.2% visitors in the diver category interested in dive destinations.
An additional feature in-lined with the show is the awarding of nominations voted by the readers of these three magazines in association of several categories. Under the Overseas Destination categories, Palau overall took 2nd place for Best Diving Area, 2nd place for Resort Area, and 3rd place for Best Dreaming Area. Palau operators did very well taking first place in three categories: Palau Pacific Resort took 1st place for Best Dive Resort, Aqua Magic took 1st place for Favorite Dive Operator, and Palau Sport took 1st place for Best Live-aboard. So with the continuing hard work and support from our local operators to take part in promoting Palau as a choice destination for diving and non-diving, we hope that the visitors to the fair would choose to visit and brand Palau as number #1 in the future.