Cuba’s eastern province of Holguin has everything any territory is required to host international conferences, said Conrado Martinez Corona, chief of the island nation’s Convention Bureau.

During the recently concluded Eighth Holguin Tradeshow, the Cuban high-ranking official praised infrastructure and facilities in this province that has rapidly become Cuba’s third-biggest travel destination.

Mr. Corona also extolled the superb possibilities that the huge 944-room Playa Pesquero Hotel –the largest in all the West Indies- has to offer for this kind of tourist activity.

The Central American Convention (CAC), representing the region’s tourist private sector, will make its public debut at the 2004 FITUR by holding a joint press conference in Madrid with the Central American Tourism Association (CATA).

Central American heads of state are convinced the region’s seven nations are seen as a solid unit in the travel industry worldwide. Based on that common strategy, these countries agreed to found the Central American Tourism Association (CATA) on December 2002.

More than 190,000 people visited the CMT Tourism Fair in the German city of Stuttgart that this time around had Cuba as the guest country, sources close to the event’s organizing committee reported.

CMT director Ulrich Kromer pointed out that such a high number of visitors shows that Germans are once again licking their wanderlust chops. Furthermore, Mr. Kromer explained that nearly a quarter of visitors booked their next vacation travel packages at the fair, while little more than ten percent spent some $3,150 in its stands.

The 24th edition of the International Tourism Fair (FITUR), the world’s first major travel event of the year, got cracking Wednesday at the Juan Carlos I Fairgrounds in Madrid with a record-setting turnout.

The fifth edition of FITUR Congress –penciled in as the world’s second-largest tradeshow- successfully closed on the eve of the much bigger FTUR 2004, as the best trade reference of Spanish travel.

The findings of a European Union study of the investment opportunities in the tourism sector in the Caribbean will highlight the annual tripartite meeting between government, industry, and the investment community at the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Investment Conference (CHTIC 2004) in May, according to the organisers.

The eighth annual CHTIC conference from May 11-13 will be held in Jamaica and is being organised by the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA) in conjunction with the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO), Burba Hotel