The Costa Maya Tourist Compound, being built on a 12,200-acre vacant lot bathed by the Mexican Caribbean Sea, will require a $1.5 billion investment package, the state government of Quintana Roo informed today. State Tourism Secretary Artemio Santos explained the Costa Maya compound, intended for deep-pocket travelers, includes the construction of hotels, marinas and other facilities that will make it the second-biggest resort in Mexico with great chances of becoming the country’s premier home port in only three years.

Barbados´s Tourism Minister Noel Lynch stressed his government´s intention to bail British West Indies Airways (BWIA) out of a longstanding crisis and pay off a debt of undisclosed proportions. Mr. Lynch, who attended sessions of a blue-ribbon panel under the title "Caribbean Tourism: Beyond Sale of Seashells at the Beach," reminded participants that BWIA -with flights to Cuba, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and other short-hop destinations- "must do everything within its power to turn the tables and start getting good results," Mr. Lynch explained.

Gains reaped by Spanish hotel chain Sol Meliá in Cuba were up a solid 27 percent in 2003 to tally €203 million more than the year before, Gabriel Garcia, the company´s marketing director on the island, said this week. During a press conference to open Cuba´s new promotional campaign in Spain -in which the Spanish hotel company is playing a mayor role- Mr. Garcia explained that Sol Meliá is currently running 8,446 rooms and 16,892 beds in a dozen hotels on the island nation, numbers that account for 22 percent of Cuba´s total amount of accommodations.

Three Caribbean tourism ministers have underscored the significance of expanding community tourism if the industry is to remain competitive in the future. The ministers - Jamaica´s Aloun Assamba, St. Vincent and the Grenadines´ René Baptiste and Brenda Hood of Grenada - spoke at a recent town hall meeting at Brooklyn College in New York. "We´re trying to put in place a plan to get tourists to come out of the hotels and experience the cultural attributes," said Assamba, who disclosed that while Jamaica enjoys the privileges of all-inclusive packages, tourists were remaining on the hotel properties rather than exploring the island.

Bermuda´s visitor arrival figures slumped again in April, continuing a trend seen in the first quarter of the year, but industry experts have blamed this on fewer hotel beds being available than last year. There were 34,578 visitors on April - down 1.3 per cent from 35,050 for the same month last year. But figures show that for the year to date, arrivals are down 3.5 per cent at 70,519.

Barbados’s economy is growing by $66.5 million thanks to heftier tourist inflows logged between December 2003 and April this year. In that span of time, the Caribbean island’s travel industry jumped 12 percent compared to the previous period. Estimates reckoned by Barbados’s Tourism Ministry indicate the recently concluded wintertime season was the best in years, yielding $259 million worth of revenues for the tourist sector.