The GDS Amadeus completed its acquisition of European hospitality technology company Optims, after it had taken a 30% stake in Optims in September 2003. It now controls the entire company. Optims now can provide hoteliers with a complete suite of services, covering everything from booking to checkout. In a similar move, Sabre late last year had acquired Synxis, also a hotel technology provider.

The lack of cooperation within the airline industry in the Caribbean is contributing to the poor financial status of this sector in the region, regretted Garry Cullen, Chief Executive Officer of the Antigua-based Leeward Islands Air Transport (LIAT). Mr. Cullen expressed that the overall state of the regions air carriers must be a matter of serious concern to Caribbean governments as well as the aviation and tourism industry leaders. LIAT has been forced to launch a new strategic plan in an effort to cope with its financial woes.

The Caribbean has emerged as an attractive market for struggling United States airlines and more recent upstarts – the low cost carriers. With the global aviation industry facing the most turbulent period ever, leading US airlines have been steadily expanding service to the region, seeking to capitalize on relatively high volumes of leisure and VFR traffic (visiting friends and relatives) in and out of the Caribbean.

The number of hotels under Barceló Crestline Corp. management can grow threefold following the purchase of all shares of class A common stock of John Q. Hammons Hotels for $13 per share, which has a total value of about $84 million. Barceló Crestline, the parent company of Crestline Hotels & Resorts, is buying the publicly owned part of JQH Hotels, which is 24 percent of the company. Mr. John Q. Hammons owns the other 76 percent and he will participate in the acquiring company by exchanging all of his other equity interest in JQH Hotels for preferred equity in the acquiring company.

The government and the private sector in the Dominican Republic are planning to pour over $36 million into the advance of tourism in the Samana area, some 200 miles northwest of Santo Domingo, in a project that will also cover the zones of Las Galeras and Las Terrenas. The tourist project is part of a much bigger $275 million program that will home in on the building and streamlining of all infrastructure in the country´s premier travel destinations. The whole plan is expected to come to an end in the summer of 2007.

Brazilian airline VARIG, marred in financial dire straits for quite some time, is eying the recently enacted Bankruptcy Act, that was signed into law by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva last week, as the lifeline that could pull the company out of heavy indebtedness. With a $1.8 billion debt in tow –most of the money is owed to public companies- VARIG has been scrambling for over two years now to work its way out of a crisis that has dragged the carrier to the brink of complete shutdown time and again.