Sol Meliá, Spain’s number-one hotel chain and tenth worldwide, announced it netted gross benefits for $41.74 million in the first nine months of 2003 for a 33 percent upswing compared to the same span of time the year before.
Iberia’s gross benefits for the first three quarters of the year plummeted a staggering 36.6 percent from 175.15 million euros in 2002 to little more than 111 million euros this time around, sources close to the airline’s front office informed.
The same sources cited a number of factors that have pushed the company’s benefits down. For them, the premiere cause is the emergence of a brawnier European currency compared to the dollar, especially when roughly 18 percent of all plain ticket revenues are collected in greenbacks.
The residents of Costa Rica’s Caribe Sur made it clear they won’t accept a change in their area’s development if that implies the building of high-rise hotels.
Up to now, lodging projects have stuck to the original idea of not exceeding 20 rooms each. Now residents claim the area’s attractiveness could be in jeopardy if the draft plan for making two-story, 50-room establishments finally gets the green light from the Costa Rican Tourism Institute.
The 21st edition of the Havana International Fair –the island nation’s biggest annual tradeshow- rolled down the curtains last Sunday with as many as $160 million in contracts, the largest chunk of them inked with U.S. companies, official sources reportedly said.
The fair that got cracking last Nov. 2 had a turnout of 1,293 companies from 48 countries, including 700 foreign firms.
The Posadas Group, a Mexican hotel chain, has started out an ambitious two-year expansion plan across Latin America that entertains the possibility of opening a number of resorts in Brazil, Chile and Argentina with a $400 million budget.
The building impulse derived from this project will add some 20,000 rooms to the group’s stock of accommodations, announced Pablo Azcarraga, deputy vice president of hotel operations for Posadas.
Cuba’s central province of Villa Clara got a chance to show off its business opportunities for foreign investment during the recently concluded 21st edition of the Havana International Fair.
The local leisure industry laid out its own refurbishment schemes for the Comercio Hotel in Caibarien and the Barcelona Resort in Remedios in an effort to grab some funds for getting those projects going. On the other hand, the province’s mid-sized and small industries requested technological support for the assembly and manufacturing of a number of items.