The Puerto Rican leisure industry closed 2004 with a bang after averaging 78.9 percent hotel occupancy, up nearly three percentage points from the year before.
The Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association (PRHTA) said the final tally for the island nation´s economy peaked $4.9 billion, up a walloping 42 percent from 2003. The local hospitality sector now accounts for 6.6 percent of the gross national product.
The number of foreign visitors that traveled to Chile in 2004 spent $1.2 billion in all. According to a recent report released by the South American nation´s National Tourism Service (SERNATUR), the country welcomed 1.8 million trippers from overseas all through last year.
The local tourist sector also snapped up 10 percent more revenues in 2004 than the year before, when it came in for 1.1 million sunbathers.
US Airways got a boost in its effort to survive when the federal Air Transportation Stabilization Board (ATSB) agreed January 13 to let the airline extend its use of cash proceeds from its federally guaranteed loan through June 30.
US Airways has been operating with the use of ATSB cash collateral since its second Chapter 11 filing Sept. 12 of last year, but that agreement was due to expire Jan. 15.
The World Tourism Organization (WTO) will dispatch a mission to the Dominican Republic in an effort to boost up joint development projects on the Haitian border.
The Dominican Tourism Department informed in a press release the WTO delegation will stay in the country for 11 days to sketch out a master plan for the nation´s southwest region that involves businesspeople and governmental officials from both countries.
At least some 2,500 rooms in houses and condos that lodge tourists all year round in Mexico´s Playa del Carmen are being accused of tax evasion and of seriously damaging the finances of licensed establishments that do comply with the 2 percent lodging tax levied on them, Jose Acevedo Peña, general manager of the Mayan Riviera Hotel Association, denounced this week.
For his part, Lenin Amero Betancourt, president of the Playa del Carmen Small Hotel Association, indicated those lodging houses and condos resort to the Internet and means of their own for advertisement, yet they benefit from the high-peak travel season because they pay no taxes at all.
The seaquake that hit South East Asia in late December has cost French travel operators as many as €85 million with more than fifty percent of would-be travelers calling off trips to the region, the organization that groups France´s travel agencies and tour operators, CETO, reported this week.
CETO execs, who recently sat down in Paris with governmental officials linked to the travel industry, said the biggest dent so far is in the January reservations to travel destinations on the Maldives Islands and in Sri Lanka, with similarly high levels of booking cancellations between February and April.