TUI, Europe’s number-one tour operator, has teed off the ongoing year with heavy losses, the company’s President Michael Frenzel informed this week in Hanover.
Stacked up against the first three months of 2003, the group’s first-quarter losses tallied €149 million ($175 million), up a gaping 50 percent, Mr. Frenzel continued.
One of the main reasons behind this downfall in the beginning of 2004 had to do with the fact that TUI netted no additional buyout gains as it did happen in 2003 before company sold some of its segments.
Argentine Airlines (AA) has just reopened its office in San Juan and one of its jetliners covering the Miami-Buenos Aires route will start flying to Puerto Rico as early as November, AA’s Marketing Manager for the Caribbean Eduardo Rozen said this week.
A 247-seat Airbus 340 will make a weekly stopover in San Juan en route from Miami to Buenos Aires.
Mr. Rozen indicated the air carrier has included this flight given the increasing interest of Puerto Ricans to travel to Buenos Aires since December 2002, most of them driven by the ongoing currency exchange rates.
An analysis pieced together by the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicates that Latin America and the Caribbean won’t be able to put growth numbers on the board unless they lay the grounds for sustainable development on the basis of equality.
Experts say that as long as women, schoolchildren and least-favored sectors –like indigenous people- continue to have nutritional, educational and healthcare shortfalls, they’ll never become a competitive workforce in the economic field.
After opening four new resorts during the first three months of the ongoing year, Spanish hotel chain Sol Meliá’s benefits soared 30 percent for a grand total of €13.2 million.
Gross revenues netted by Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, the worldwide booking network, tallied €63.1 million in the first quarter of 2004 for an eye-popping 40.2 percent growth from last year’s first three months, the National Stock Markets Commission reported today.
Sale earnings totaled €537.9 million in the first quarter of the ongoing year, compared to €503.5 million the company nabbed in the first three months of 2003 when it put up a 6.8 percent increase.
Chile’s LAN Airlines, the air carrier with the soundest spreadsheet all across Latin America, is hoping to reach out for the Argentine market this year by acquiring American Falcon, a U.S. low-budget air company.
Argentina is a strategic market for LAN in its bid to become the premier regional operator with flights all around the South American Cone, said Alejandro de la Fuente, LAN’s financial director.