Tu Viaje (Your Travel) Exposition will get underway Saturday with the attendance of both national and international companies –involved in providing tourist services- that will gather at Mexico City’s World Trade Center.

With such attractions as three-century-old locomotives, the International Steam Festival will open Nov. 20 through 30 in Ciego de Avila, organized in a tour format this time around.

The Festival will kick off Nov. 20 in the city of Cardenas, in the province of Matanzas, on its way to Villa Clara, Cienfuegos and Ciego de Avila where it will come to a close Nov. 30.

Festival attendants will travel in wagons hauled by old-timed steam trains and will take part in lectures and tours on request. Moreover, they’ll get a chance to watch speed races and crews’ ability contests.

Entrepreneurs from 17 countries gathered in Ecuador’s Quito over the weekend in an effort to advertise the tourist products of their own nations within the framework of an event that scooped up $17 million worth of business deals, organizers indicated.

The 27th Business Meeting planned by the Quito City Hall and Travel-Mart Latin America –a tourist marketplace that deals with travel packages in each and every of the participating countries- was the perfect setting for this kind of promotional endeavor.

Over a dozen Latin American countries attended the Top Résa International Fair that concluded Saturday after a three-day session in the French coastal city of Deauville.

Mexico, the world’s third nation as to the number of incoming tourists, was one of the most sought-after stands in the tradeshow.

The goal of Mexico’s tourist authorities is to close the ongoing year with far more foreign visitors than the 19.7 million sunbathers who traveled to the nation in 2002, a figure that accounted for a 0.7 percent slide compared to the numbers posted in 2001, though.

The 2003 ExpoVaradero Tradeshow rolled down its curtain following four days of frenzied business negotiations that churned out 144 contracts for a grand total of $2.5 million.

Attendants also inked 63 letters of intention and cut four joint-venture deals, the president of the Organizing Committee Felix Garcia said during the closing ceremony of this tradeshow that seeks to come up with import alternatives in the realm of tourism.

Barbados is bracing itself to welcome regional and international media luminaries to the island for the 5th Caribbean Media Exchange on Sustainable Tourism (CMEx V) in October, an event that is held biannually since 2001.