After years of high expectations contrasted by depressing results, the 2003-2004 cruise ship season marked a number of pleasant surprises for local tour operators, restaurants, and hoteliers in Valparaiso.

For many years, local operators had complained as major tour wholesalers, based exclusively in Santiago, dominated 95% of the cruise passenger market, herding thousands of eager passengers onto buses and rushing them in ho-hum fashion through historic Valparaiso on the way to the Santiago airport or one of the major hotels chains in Santiago.

"For years the dynamics of the cruise ship market left smaller operators in the wake, creating a certain sense of fatalism, jealousy, and helplessness," says Todd Temkin, President of the Valparaiso Foundation.

"Chile's major tourism wholesalers, faced with the logistical complexities of moving thousands of people at once, opted not to aggressively promote Valparaiso. The painful thing was that this decision had nothing to do with the city's merits. On the contrary, it had everything to do with business. The problem has been that Valparaiso's principal appeal has always been the intimacy of its hillside historic districts, its labrynthine streets, its adorable hilltop restaurants and terraces. Such a city intimidates wholesalers who face the challenge of having to move tremendous quantities of people at once. Imagine if all of your clients wanted to ride up Valparaiso's funicular elevators. The cars hold 7 people and your are trying to push through entire busloads! Of course, any problem can be solved with a modicum of imagination, but instead of innovating, the major wholesalers preferred to oversell other types of products, such as pre and post tours to multi-national vineyards where they could easily bring hundreds of people at a crack."

But this depressing scenario began to change in 2003, as more and more cruise passengers began to demand of their tour operators the opportunity to spend time in Valparaiso. Amazingly, such changes had little to do with the benevolent attitudes of large tour companies. "We are finding ourselves more and more forced to find innovative ways to show off Valparaiso, because tourists are demanding it," says George Mozny, a specialist in cruise passenger reception for Sportours. "The demand to visit Valparaiso has surprised all expectations, and is not limited only to cruise ship passengers, but to all of our clients all year long."

In an attempt to explain the phenomenon, analysts point to Valparaiso's recent designation as a UNESCO world heritage site, as well as to the proliferation of websites, books, art, and other medium dedicated to the urban renewal of "The Jewel of the Pacific."

While many of the owners of Valparaiso's trademark hilltop restaurants, such as the Gato Tuerto, La Colombina, el Cafe Brighton, or el Cafe Turri, noted a greater presence of cruise ship passengers in their establishments this year, all of them agree that Valparaiso has yet to completely solve the puzzle of the "monopoly of the wholesalers."

"I receive international tourists here all year because they are recommended by the finest hotels in Viña and Santiago," says Pilar Silva, manager of the famous "Gato Tuerto" in Valparaiso's Bellavista Hill, "but until this year I received almost no cruise ship passengers. One couple told me that they went straight from the boat to the Hyatt in Santiago, only to be told by the concierge that they had missed a once-in-a-lifetime experience by not visiting the Gato. Amazingly, this couple rented a transfer and came back to Valparaiso the next day. But not all passengers are quite so adventurous!

As Raul Alcazar, owner of the Cafe Turri once stated: "We are optimistic that things are improving, but I can hardly say that we are satisfied. It is frustrating to hear cruise ship passengers say time and time again, 'we are having a great time in Valparaiso, what a shame the dozens of friends we met on the boat went straight back to Santiago.' "