Sol Meliá grabbed just $41.75 million in the first three-quarters

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.

The group’s benefits plunged to $703 million from $789.39 million amassed during the first three quarters of 2002, mainly as a result of a stomping euro that stacked up better against the dollar, Sol Meliá informed in a report sent to Spanish financial authorities.

The company’s gross surplus shrank 7.1 percent to $179 million euros.

According to the aforesaid report, “the good outcomes chalked up during the summertime season –especially in Spain and the Caribbean- confirm the recovery of the sector that started out back in April.”

Sol Meliá reported an undisclosed surplus figure for the third quarter of the year coming from the sale of a hotel in Benalmadena (southern Andalusia) for 16.8 million euros.

Sol Meliá’s Europe Division (dealing with leisure hotels) did the rest of the company one better with a yearly 3.5 percent upturn of average earnings per room (AER). “This figure lays bare,” the report indicates, “the good show put on by leisure hotels during the summer, mostly in Spain, as a result of a stalwart tourist recovery on the Balearic and Canary islands.”

The annual AER index in the megabuck company’s America Division, though, skidded 20.4 percent, mostly driven by a weaker dollar compared to the a much heftier euro. However, such destinations as Mexico and the Dominican Republic gave the hotel chains its best numbers in the Western Hemisphere.

Between January and September this year, Sol Meliá added a dozen new resorts to its stock of 335 hotels (80,505 rooms in all) in some thirty countries. There are new agreements in place to add twenty more lodgings in the future, the report concluded.