Foreign tourists that visited Brazil from January to September this year shelled out over $2.3 billion, up a whopping 33.1 percent from the same period of time last year, the country´s Central Bank informed this week. According to the banking institution, foreign trippers in Brazil forked over some $220 million in September alone, an 8.2 percent increase compared to the same month a year before.

Cuba’s Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero suggested foreign travelers coming to Cuba from November 8 onward to avoid the use of U.S. dollars and bring in other hard currencies. In a press conference held in Havana yesterday, Mr. Marrero recommended would-be foreign trekkers to bring euros, Canadian dollars, British pounds or Swiss francs rather than U.S. dollars in order to make their stays cheaper and easier.

Canada’s Desjardin International Development (DID) has just inked an agreement with the National Tourism Development Fund of Mexico (FONATUR) to assess the feasibility of setting up a financial institution that could support the advance of tourism in Baja California. DID –an affiliate of Quebec’s Desjardins Cooperative Movement Fund- will weigh the possibility of creating a financial institution aimed at bankrolling mom-and-pop businesses and local producers in the Mar de Cortes Tourism Project of Mexico’s Baja California.

Copa Airlines, the Panamanian carrier, announced the purchase of ten 90-seat E-Jets airplanes for $300 million from Brazilian company Embraer. The first two jetliners will get to Panama by the end of 2005, while the remaining eight planes will start trickling in from late 2005 through 2008.

American Airlines will start putting additional charges to some European and Latin American nations in which travel agents issue paper plane tickets for destinations where electronic tickets could be doled out instead, an action that’s being applied in the U.S. The surcharge for Mexico, the Caribbean and other Latin American countries will be fixed at $25. In Spain, Belgium and France, it’ll be €25 apiece.

Direct foreign investment in Latin America and the Caribbean will grow steadily this year, a token of increasing confident on the part of investors and developers in the region, a report issued by the Inter American Development Bank (BID is the Spanish acronym) states. “In terms of direct foreign investment in the region, there are clear indications that cash inflows toward Latin America and the Caribbean will be back on the rise in 2004,” the report indicates.