Italy-based consortium Exedra –made up of ten companies- is paving the way to pour some $400 million into El Salvador’s tourist sector to build a resort in the eastern beach of Tamarindo, the Salvadoran Investment Promotion Agency (PROESA) informed.
Exedra officials traveled to San Salvador to hand in the project to local authorities. The draft scheme includes the construction of half a dozen five-star hotels with 500 rooms each, four nontraditional resorts, a couple of golf courses and a tourism training school.
The arrival of foreign tourists to the Jorge Chavez International Airport grew an unprecedented 23.7 percent in January this year, compared to that same month of 2004, Peruvian Foreign Trade and Tourism Minister Alfredo Ferrero said.
Mr. Ferrero informed the arrival of 63,366 foreigners in January clearly outnumbered the 51,235 visitors from other countries that entered the nation in early 2004, up a whopping 40 percent if stacked up against January 2000, the year that marked the beginning of a solid recovery for Peru’s travel industry.
Iberostar Hotels & Resorts’ expansion plan in 2005 includes the opening of 14 new establishments, bringing the tally to 92 facilities and 61,650 rooms in all.
The Spanish company plans on pouring as many as €102 million in the building of new hotels and over €28 million in refurbishment works in the course of the ongoing year.
Spain is now the second-largest investing nation in Latin America, amassing nearly half of all the money poured into the region by the European Union. Furthermore, the country is beefing up its long-term investment projects and is girding for more, Spanish Tourism and Commerce Secretary Pedro Mejia said this week.
Spanish hotels comprise 44 percent of all foreign accommodations in Latin America with more than 200 lodgings. According to Mr. Mejia, tourism will be one of Spain’s strategic and top-priority lines between 2005 and 2008.
France-based hotel company Accor closed 2004 with sales for €7.12 billion, up 4.3 percent from 2003. However, that growth could rise to 4.6 percent if the impact on hard currency exchange rates is downplayed, the company’s headquarters informed this week.
The French giant’s hotel division scooped up little more than €5 billion, up 3.8 percent from the previous year, while the service division garnered €507 million for a solid 9.4 increase.
The fate of Mexicana de Aviacion and Aeromexico is still shaky as long as both companies don’t come up with a buyout plan, the Mexican Institute of Bank Saving Protection (IPAB is the Spanish acronym) reported this week.
IPAB Secretary-General Mario Beauregard explained before the House Communications Commission that Cintra, the top administrative body of the nation’s major airlines, is currently working on the revamping of both carriers before selling them out.