Mexico’s peso rose to its highest in two months on expectations that growth in the U.S., Mexico’s biggest trading partner, will sustain demand for goods from Latin America’s second-biggest economy. A report last week showing manufacturing in New York state unexpectedly accelerated bolstered confidence the U.S. economy is withstanding a slump in the housing market. In the first six months of 2006, 96 percent of Mexico’s non-oil exports were from the manufacturing sector.

Construction of the road that links Santo Domingo with Samana, the Portilllo, Catey and Arroyo Barril airports and a plan to overhaul the territory have raised interest among local and foreign investors that look into investing in tourism projects in Samana and other regions of northern Dominican Republic. It is expected that this investment boom will triplicate the hotel offer there at two thousand rooms in Samana.

Nicaragua announced Wednesday plans to build a waterway linking the Pacific and Atlantic that would carry bigger ships than the existing Panama Canal. President Enrique Bolaños addressing in Managua the meeting of Defense ministers from the Western Hemisphere said the new route, at a cost of $18 billion and twelve years, was needed given the rise in world shipping.

TravelCLICK’s quarterly eMonitor outcomes indicate continued robust health for the hotel industry based on electronic distribution performance for the second quarter of the ongoing year. The data shows that worldwide electronic hotel revenue from the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and key Internet sites increased 13.7 percent over the second quarter of 2005.

Jamaican exports have reported a 39 percent growth for the period between January and May 2006, with earnings moving from approximately $641 million to $827 million, that according to Andre Gordon, President of the Jamaica Exporters Association (JEA). Giving a breakdown of the sector’s performance, Gordon said that food export “has recovered nicely and is up. Beverage export, which is a major growing segment of the food business, has increased significantly at over 39 percent”.

While headlines are trumpeting a deflating of the housing real estate bubble, the market in hotel real estate continues to boom. Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels, a hotel real estate management company, recently reported that through the first six months of 2006, the total volume of U.S. hotel sales of $10 million or more set a record of $21.8 billion. That surpasses the previous record for an entire year, $21 billion in 2005.