Alec Sanguinetti, director-general and CEO of the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA), said this week that the region’s private sector is playing an increasingly bigger role in the development of the local travel industry. Mr. Sanguinetti uttered these remarks during a recent consulting meeting on merger and business opportunities for the tourist sector that gathered representatives from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Rim.
Mr. Sanguinetti’s remarks served to highlight the vast array of investment possibilities that the Caribbean Basin has to offer, not only for building new hotels and remodeling others, but also for spending money in such areas as agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure and attractions.
Spain´s Iberia Airways has officially closed down its regional hub in Miami to start flying nonstop from Madrid to Panama, Guatemala and Costa Rica using its own fleet, as well as to Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua through a bilateral agreement with TACA, the local air service provider.
Drawbacks derived from heightened security controls in the United States have forced Iberia to lock down its international hub in Miami, a spokesperson from the Spanish air company told Caribbean News Digital.
Central American nations have turned to donors and financial institutions to get the cash they need for the execution of tourism development plans that could eventually help the region reap gains and create more jobs.
“We want to implement tourism projects at a regional level, so we believe it’s important to keep individual donors that contribute money for Central American countries posted on the regional integration process and its projects,” Salvadoran Tourism Minister Luis Cardenal said.
Forest caretakers on the Galapagos Islands have been walking the picket lines for the past two weeks and have caused $6 million in losses for the Ecuadorian government up to now, said Roque Sevilla, president of the Tourism Chamber in the province of Pichincha.
Mr. Sevilla, who´s linked to several environmental groups, said tour operators have been hit harder than any other sector by the third strike staged by forest caretakers this year.
Foreign tourists that visited Brazil during the first eight months of the ongoing year spent little more than $2.1 billion, up 36.4 percent from the same period of time in 2003.
According to statistics provided by the country´s Central Bank, the amount of money spent by foreign travelers in the country and the number of Brazilians traveling overseas combine for a $355 million surplus for the local leisure industry, compared to $87 million the South American nation came in for in the first eight months of last year. In 2003, Brazil welcomed 4.1 million foreign tourists that shelled out some $3.4 billion in all.
Marriott Hotels is planning to build a new lodging facility in the Nicaraguan Pacific coast. The 250-room establishment with an in-house casino will take an initial investment of $50 million. Sources close to the project told Caribbean News Digital that $5 million have already been poured into the new resort, most of it for groundbreaking works. The new colonial-style hotel will be located in the municipality of Villa El Carmen, some 22 miles northwest of Managua.