Brussels’s trade courthouse ruled Monday that Belgium’s charter flight company Sobelair had definitely gone bankrupt. The air carrier had been struggling for months to stay afloat, judicial sources pointed out.
The Belgian airline was an affiliate of Sabena, a company that met a similar fate in late 2001. After filing for bankruptcy, Sobelair cancelled its four daily flights to Mexico’s Cancun, Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, plus Alicante and Las Palmas in Spain, sources close to the front office indicated.
Nicaragua’s leisure industry churned out $150 million in 2003 thanks to the coming of half a million travelers for a walloping $34 million spike from 2002, thus underlining its role as the country’s top source of hard-currency revenues, the Nicaraguan Tourism Institute (INTUR) reported.
The institution’s stats reveal the local travel industry has way outnumbered the six-digit figures made by such commodities as coffee, mutton, lobster, raw gold and peanuts from the list of the nation’s top twenty exportable items.
The findings of a European Union study of the investment opportunities in the tourism sector in the Caribbean will open the annual tripartite meeting between government, industry, and the investment community at the upcoming Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Investment Conference (CHTIC 2004).
Mexico’s Tourism Department recently informed the country reaped $9.3 billion out of nearly 19 million tourists who visited the Aztec nation all through 2003.
The figure accounts for a new all-time high and a 2 percent overall increase in hotel occupancy rates from 2002.
During last year’s high-peak season (stretching from December 23 to January 5), both Cancun and the Mayan Riviera put the best numbers on the board with a blistering 93 percent occupancy rate.
The Brazilian government will spend roughly $450 million during the course of the ongoing year to give the airports of Congonhas (San Pablo), Santos Dumont (Rio de Janeiro) and Pampulha (Belo Horizonte) a new lease on life.
Most refurbishment works will be focused on adding more comfort, better access conditions and tighter security.
The three air terminals bear the brunt of the country’s domestic flights and make up the trilogy of Brazil’s most profitable sector in national aviation.
Argentine officials, businesspeople and hoteliers are wallowing in the tourist boom sweeping Argentina and following a record-high 1.2 million foreign visitors in 2003, most of them hailing from Brazil, Chile, the United States and Spain.