Dominican Republic Vacation Information and Travel Guides

In the Dominican Republic you’ll find an abundance of fauna and flora, of white sand beaches, couple of  tiny islands and of fresh seafood. Here you will find relevant travel information and sight seeing information of the main DR travel destinations. Dominican Republic  offers much cultural diversity with its seven native Indian populations, a pleasant mix of Latin mentality and American efficiency, and the Dominicans command of English which makes traveling easy and fun.

“Enjoy DR” provides you with travel information and maps of many travel destinations in DR. Choose from one of our vacation packages and tours or work closely with one of our travel agents to design your perfect vacation. Help yourself with our travel guide to Santo Domingo, Santiago, Puerto Plata, La Romana  or Punta Cana and read more interesting facts about Samana, Sans Souci or Barahona . Seeing Bahia de las Aguilas is an essential part of a DR trip.

“Enjoy DR”  coordinates with  tour operators and destination specialist for PDR. Our speciality is to elaborate custom itineraries and tours for all ages and interests. We arrange for hotels, car rentals, discount airfare and ground transfers and anything else to fit the needs of groups and individual tourists planning to travel in DR. We also organize complex travel itineraries combining DR with visits to other Caribbean countries!

“EnjoyDR” invites you to discover a variety of incredible destinations in DR.  Coordination with our travel agents provide efficient and quality service and they can make all your travel arrangements for a trip to DR.

Dominican Republic is situated between Cuba and Puerto Rico  and has a population of approx. 3.5  Mio. It has one of the highest GDP growth rates and is one of the most ‘globalised’ countries in Latin America. It is also among the greatest and fastest growing tourism markets in Latin America and over 200 cruise liners land in DR, bringing more than 80,000 tourists a year.

Interested in learning Spanish? Start preparing for your next trip with  Spanish Lessons from Spanish Learning Trips sections.

HP recommends the purchase of travel insurance to all our customers. To compare insurance options and to get an instant quote, please click here!

Contact  us for your Spanish study holiday vacations 

Dominican Republic

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 Situated on the coast, not far from Catalina Island, is the tourist resort of Casa de Campo, designed by celebrated architect Oscar della Renta. The resort features top hotels and highly regarded golf courses. Altos de Chavon is found here, modelled on a 15th Century Mediterranean-style village. The work of Italian Roberto Coppa, the village features houses in golden-coloured stone and a river running through jungle landscape. The village was a location for several scenes in the Francis-Ford Coppola film “Apocalypse Now”. Altos is also the home of an artists’ colony and a selection of exhibitions can usually be found. Other attractions include an amphitheatre and archaeological museum which houses over 2,000 finds from the native Taino indians..

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   The island was discovered by Columbus in 1492, after being shipwrecked. Like most of the Caribbean, it has European and African influences, resulting in a distinctive mix of cultures. When Columbus landed, there were approximately 100,000 native ‘indios’, who were almost wiped out by Spanish colonists who found the island was blessed with fertile soil and deposits of gold. Large numbers of African slaves were imported to work the plantations. In 1844, when the island became independent, 90 per cent of the population were of African descent or mixed race. In the years since, the demographic make-up of the island changed considerably with African emigration to Haiti and an influx of white farmers, a policy promoted by the Creole elite.

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The avocado is a fruit (that’s a right a fruit, not a vegetable) with much mystery and allure attached to it. Its high fat content deter some from eating it, but there are phenomenal health benefits to eating avocados in moderation. Just last week I was employing my how-to-pick-a perfect-avocado skills in the supermarket when a strange (both unknown and peculiar) man asked me to help him pick out a ripe avocado.

So lets start with that mystery. A ripe avocado’s flesh will yield slightly to the touch (semi-firm, yet flexible) and the stem should come out without to much provocation. Should you, however, choose an under-ripe avocado, a sure-fire way to ripen it is to seal the avocado in a brown paper bag, and keep in a warm but not hot place. If the avocado has already been cut open, coat the surfaces with margarine and store the same way.

Mystery #2: how to keep your avocado (once peeled, cut or even added to a recipe) from browning: throw the pit in with the avocado and it will maintain its brilliant green colour! Who knew?

And the most exciting mystery of all is the avocado’s association with the erotic. Over many centuries the avocado has maintained its reputation as an aphrodisiac. Legend has it that the Aztec word for the avocado tree is Ahuacuatl : roughly translated: testicle tree. No doubt, the name arose because of the way the fruit of the tree hung in pairs reminding those ancient people of human male anatomy. Further to this though, apparently the young Aztec women were confined indoors while this erotic fruit with aphrodisiac qualities was being harvested!!

On to the G -rated content… the avocado is also known as the alligator pear and it is native to tropical America. The fruit is a greenish, thick-skinned drupe, similar in size and shape to a large pear. When ripe, the flesh has the consistency of firm butter and a faint nutlike flavor.  In North America (Canada) the avocado is becoming more popular  than ever ! Used as a salad vegetable,  eat it with rice, bread, pasta, etc  you name it. In the tropics it is often used in soup and as paste called ‘guacamole’  a Mexican delicacie.

If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one food, it would be the avocado. The rich, buttery-smooth flesh of an avocado is on a lot of people’s lists as a delicious but fattening treat. It’s true that avocados have a high oil content, but they are also packed with vitamins A, C, and E–primary vitamins in the antioxidant group that protect the cells in human tissue. A high protein content makes avocados a good meat substitute, and unlike animal fat, the fat is not saturated. The big surprise in avocados is how high they are in dietary fiber–they have one of the highest fiber contents of any fruit or vegetable.

Our Dominican Republic Avocado producer and importer  partner company represents approximately 60% of Dominican Republic avocado production with the main focus to export fresh avocados to international markets.

We develop successful business relationships through mutual trust and respect.
 
Avocados grow abundantly in warm climates, Dominican Republic’s soil is more than perfect!! . Spaniards discovered them when Cortez arrived on these shores in the sixteenth century, but avocados had been eaten for centuries by aboriginals of the American continent. Excavators have unearthed avocado pits in Peru that date to before AD 900.

For instance most people knows that Mexican and US’s southwestern cuisines include a lot of avocados, but the fruit–especially the “Haas” variety, that we mostly see in Canadian supermarkets –has become extremely popular in the Far East too.

Avocado consumption in North America and Europe has increased significantly over the last ten years. The increase has been more remarkable in USA, Canada or even France and Germany where per capita consumption went from 400 to 1500 grams. In spite of that, avocado is still considered an exotic product in most 1erst world countries, where consumption is less than 250 grams per capita. This means that there is an important market potential for avocado in those countries. This market potential becomes even greater if we consider that the demand for organic avocado has yet to be satisfied.

In the DR, we are helping  farmers develop their organic business and find new markets for their products, thereby achieving market driven development and encouraging economic entrepreneurship.

Dominican Republic avocados that are imported are, in my opinion, better and bigger than the Mexican ‘hass” varieties grown in Florida.

Interest in the Avocado business or suppliers ? Contact us or join in one of our   business insight trips

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Other star Dominican Product : Dominican Coffe

Learn  Spanish  language in the second largest Caribbean city in the latin America Spanish-speaking world.  For further immersion in the language and culture, the associate school has Spanish culture and civilization lectures, cinema and guided excursions are held at no additional cost.  Contact Here

Subject-Focused Tour Programs
We offer  a wide DR range of  language programs in the most populated city for educational tours (Santo Domingo).  Spanish  language focus with hands-on cultural programming, or a trip that leans more towards history or social studies, HP can develop a custom tour program for you. Ask about our humanitarian and linguistic tour packages!
 
Customized Learning Itineraries
We customize each of our tour itineraries based on the needs and interests of the group. We believe that travel should be both educational AND fun. We’ll help you build an itinerary that will delight the students and connect the classroom lessons they’ve learned with the bigger world they’re exploring.

 We don’t run “touristy” tours with minimal cultural Spanish-Caribbean  immersion. Instead, learners  fall in love with our island as we show them the real Dominican Republic from within (no Hard Rock Cafe, please!). Plus, they step out of their comfort zone to meet some “Quisqueyanos” “en español.”   Contact us for  your trip!

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As already pointed out in our email list  How To Attend  DR Trade Fairs More Effectively, Dominicans believe in building relationships face to face with their overseas trading partners instead of dealing with someone only through e-mails or by phone.

You have to make following arrangements at an early stage to make your intended business trip to DR smooth and successful.

•Hotel bookings
•Visa application
•Flight bookings
•Book appointments with key suppliers
•Plan to visit one or more trade fairs in DR
•Plan to visit some of your supplier factories

Therefore each trip has to be carefully planned because poor preparations diminish your success and influence your achievable profit negatively. It may seem to you that your schedule becomes too tight, but with a good planning you will manage it. However, no matter how hard you try to reduce your expenses, you will still end up spending more than you planned during your business trip in DR. Therefore it is necessary to make the most of your trip.

Since most of the important DR trade fairs are scheduled for April and October respectively, your schedule is automatically pegged to these periods.

You will have the advantage that most suppliers are available for meetings with you then, as long as you make your appointments early enough.

Unfortunately hotels and flights are usually fully booked (the occupancy rates of some major hotels in Puerto Plata for instance nowadays are close to 80% during the peak season) and on top you have to pay much higher room rates and air fares than during the off-peak period. In DR  it is common that the room rates at the hotels surrounding the exhibition centers double during that time and even in Santo Domingo, Romana or Punta Cana you can expect to pay at least 20-30% more.

… The inconvenience of having a longer travel time to the exhibitions is compensated by more affordable rates …
You can compensate for the higher room rates by booking hotels which are further away from the main business hotel areas and the exhibition center. The inconvenience of having a longer travel time to the exhibitions is compensated by more affordable rates.

There are of course substantial differences between Mainland  DR  hotels ( Sto Dgo or Santiago) and hotels in Puerto Plata or Punta Cana. If you want to visit some of your factories outside the great cities in DR, it may be necessary to stay overnight at a nearby hotel.

Travel agents are usually not familiar with all locations in DR and we have always asked our suppliers to book a hotel for us. You do not need to worry about the quality of the hotel. Your suppliers usually will choose a hotel which is acceptable by foreigners disregarding whether it is a four or five star hotel. We have never been disappointed and even received better room rates because the factories have some corporate rates with the hotel.

In Santo Domingo, Puerto Plata and Santiago  and other larger cities, you can get better room rates at your hotel, when you have a proven track record of a certain number of room nights per year. It is worth to bargain for it because the hotels seldom offer them voluntarily. It makes also therefore sense to stick with your hotel if the service was acceptable for you.

Our email list will give you an easy to follow guideline, based on our long import export experience in Dominican Republic, how to prepare DR  business trips more effectively and most importantly how to reduce your cost.

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Star Product : Dominican Coffe

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