Mexico’s Tourism Department recently informed the country reaped $9.3 billion out of nearly 19 million tourists who visited the Aztec nation all through 2003.

The figure accounts for a new all-time high and a 2 percent overall increase in hotel occupancy rates from 2002.

During last year’s high-peak season (stretching from December 23 to January 5), both Cancun and the Mayan Riviera put the best numbers on the board with a blistering 93 percent occupancy rate.

The Brazilian government will spend roughly $450 million during the course of the ongoing year to give the airports of Congonhas (San Pablo), Santos Dumont (Rio de Janeiro) and Pampulha (Belo Horizonte) a new lease on life.

Most refurbishment works will be focused on adding more comfort, better access conditions and tighter security.

The three air terminals bear the brunt of the country’s domestic flights and make up the trilogy of Brazil’s most profitable sector in national aviation.

Argentine officials, businesspeople and hoteliers are wallowing in the tourist boom sweeping Argentina and following a record-high 1.2 million foreign visitors in 2003, most of them hailing from Brazil, Chile, the United States and Spain.

The Chilean government underscored today its optimism toward economic projections for the ongoing year with GNP numbers in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 percent.

Consumer index, though, could grow a percentage point more than the nation’s GNP, Chile’s Finance Minister Nicolas Eyzaguirre said in a news conference escorted by his colleagues Jorge Rodriguez and Alfonso Dulanto, Ministers of the Economy and Mining, respectively.

Brazil kissed the year 2003 good-bye with a favorable trade balance tipping to $24.8 billion, the largest black numbers in the history of the country, governmental sources indicated.

The 2003 trade surplus was 89 percent higher than the year before when the country’s exports did imports one better by a $13.1 billion margin.

Last year’s upshots were also up $19.2 billion compared to the 1988 spreadsheets, up to now the nation’s all-time high.

The leisure industry, Ecuador’s fourth hard-currency maker, is enduring the aftermath of a dollar economy implemented four years ago by the administration of former president Jamil Mahuad, sources close to the local travel industry informed.

Ecuador’s former Minister of the Economy, Rocio Vasquez, admitted in an interview with Management magazine that foreign tourism is taking a very slow burn, mostly as a result of pricier services within the sector.