Cuba’s tourism gives hotel investment top priority

Cuba is giving investors in the local leisure industry, the island nation’s most thriving and dynamic economic sector, more wiggle room in an effort to raise its stock of accommodations and spur up the development of eight complementary tourist regions in the country, weekly newspaper Business in Cuba reported.

In this sense, the publication mentions Havana, Varadero

–the nation’s premiere travel circuit- the southern coasts of the central provinces of Cienfuegos and Sancti Spiritus,

Santiago de Cuba and the Canarreos Archipelago, a group of keys in the waters off southern Havana province that comprises the Isle of Youth and Cayo Largo.

The recently concluded Third International Conference on Tourism Construction opened a window of opportunity for the exchange of experiences on some major investment problems in the country, as well as the promotion, protection and conservation of the environment.

According to stats provided by Cuba’s Tourism Ministry, the number of hotel rooms soared from 12,000 to 40,000 between 1990 and 2002. In line with these figures, the island nation leapfrogged from number 23 to the ninth spot of the ranking of tourist destinations in the Americas.

In the 1990s, investments peaked $1 billion with most of the money poured into travel infrastructure, the building of airports, power grids and the rescue of beaches.

Over 90 percent of that invested lump sum is national, even though the leisure industry was one of the harbingers in the openness to foreign capital.

Today, Cuba’s tourist sector boasts a dozen joint ventures operating some 4,700 rooms. Official estimates foresee that figure could reach 7,600 accommodations by 2006.

Out of the island nation’s 266 hotels, 102 are labeled as four-star and five-star lodgings for a grand total of 26,000 rooms in that category. As many as 18,000 rooms scattered in some fifty establishments are run by 16 foreign companies.