The mysterious respiratory condition that has already killed five dozen people and spread feSARS from Asia all the way to North America couldn’t pick a worse timing for the increasingly brittle world economy, especially the tourist industry.
The U.S. war in Iraq could further affect the already stagnated Latin American economy, warned Uruguayan Enrique Iglesias, president of the Inter American Development Bank (BID), at the opening session Monday of the 44th BID Annual Assembly in Milan, Italy.
“The immediate prospects for the world and regional economies can’t be any darker and blurrier… and they only get bigger in the face of this complicated situation now going on in the Middle East,” admitted Mr. Iglesias speaking to ministers and representatives from 46 countries, including Latin American and Caribbean nations.
The Berlin International Tourism Marketplace (ITB) –ranked as the world’s largest tradeshow of its kind- had its turnstiles turning last Friday amid one of the sourest crises the industry has ever gone through in its entire history and dampened by a looming U.S. war in Iraq.
Francesco Frangialli, secretary-general of the World Tourism Organization (WTO) said in his opening-ceremony remarks that the sector “has truly hit bedrock bottom. This is the worst crisis in the history of world tourism.”
Amid the tough situation the tourist industry went through worldwide in 2002, Cuba has not halted the development program for its number-one economic sector right now, said Carlos Lage Davila, secretary of the Executive Committee of the Cuban Council of Ministers.
A clear-cut case in point was the Jan. 21 grand opening of the 944-room Playa Pesquero Hotel, run by Gaviota Group, a resort huge enough to accommodate up to 10,000 guests and rank as the biggest on the island nation and one of the largest in the entire Caribbean.
If you still have some doubts what e-commerce is really all about, don’t worry. Even experts on technology matters don’t seem to come to terms with one another on a proper definition for such a new way of doing business.
However –to put it in simple words- we can tell you that e-commerce is a process whereby two or more parties can make a business transaction through a computer or an online network.
Tough, tense, dramatic and spooky. Sol Meliá could perfectly splay any of these adjectives on last year’s farewell ribbon. But it might as well say that it never took a break all trough 2002 and put out all the stops to remain as the leading hotel chain both in Spain and Latin America.