Pestana, a Portugal-based group, is currently negotiating the purchase of the Murano Hotel in Buenos Aires. A source close to the company’s front office informed that only minor details about the buyout remain to be worked out.

The operation includes an investment package in the neighborhood of $10 million and the renaming of the establishment as the Pestana Buenos Aires Hotel. The Murano is a four-star, 133-room resort in the downtown area of the Argentine capital, quite near the Colon Theater.

German tour operator Thomas Cook’s ability to churn out revenues in its local market dropped dramatically in the now waning summertime season, admitted Detlef Altmann, member of the management board of Europe’s second-largest tour operator. In Mr. Altmann’s opinion, the company is enduring sale losses of nearly ten percent.

However, he’s confident that free fall could be offset by the end of the season and eventually remain below ten percent.

Tourist investment this year on Mexican soil could soar to $1.5 billion, a similar figure to the one posted in 2002, said John McCarthy, director-general of the National Tourism Fund (FONATUR), for whom the aforesaid amount stands for a major feather in the country’s hat at a time when other nations are curtailing their budgets. “Mexico is keeping up the pace,” he said.

Mexico’s leisure industry raked in revenues last year for over $8.8 billion, according to stats disclosed by the nation’s Tourism Department.

In the first half of the ongoing year, some 9.2 foreign visitors flocked to Mexico’s tourist destinations for a staggering 10.5 percent increase compared to the same period of time in 2002 when the Aztec nation nicked roughly $4.9 billion.

Piñeiro, the Spain-based tourist group and one of the leaders in the country’s industry, took over management of the Club Med Hotel in Varadero. The 500-room resort owned by Cuban group Gaviota will be run under the name of Bahia Principe Varadero thanks to a management deal inked between both entities.

The Bahia Principe trademark –one of the Spanish group’s divisions- relies on its beachfront location, great food, top-quality service and special leisure choices in each and every one of its all-in hotels.

Cuba’s tourist circuit of Jardines del Rey –penciled in as the fastest-growing cluster on the island nation- is amassing revenues way over $15 million in the first seven months of 2003, thus outnumbering gross earnings netted in the same period of time the year before when its establishments grabbed $8.8 million.

In all, the circuit’s eleven hotels now operating on Coco and Guillermo keys garnered $6.7 million during that same span of time as a result of better efficiency and services offered to more than 110,000 travelers who came here in the first half of the year.