Colombia’s tourism ministry will hold a special forum aimed at attracting an increasing share of the lucrative multi-million dollar nautical tourism industry in Latin America, organizers said Thursday.
The Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) said it is grateful for the warm support and thoughts from many people around the world after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami in Japan on March 11. While rescue and recovery efforts continue in the severely struck Tohoku region, the capital city Tokyo has been recovering from a strong shock and the western part of Japan is unharmed.
Jamaica’s buoyant tourism sector could provide the stimulus for growing the island’s agriculture sector and by extension the productive sector, Minister of Tourism, the Hon. Edmund Bartlett has expressed.Addressing the Annual Caribbean Tourism Summit (ACTS) in Brussels, Belgium on March 14, Minister Bartlett said “we in tourism and our domestic industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services need to reorient our thinking and come to regard our domestic market as larger than our population.”
In the run-up to the budget, tour operators have reiterated their opposition to Air Passenger Duty in its current form. Reports last weekend claimed that the Government had abandoned a plan to switch from a “per passenger” to a “per plane” tax on the grounds that international regulations made tax on aviation fuel illegal, but a spokesman for the Treasury this week refused to rule out changes.
Peru advanced five spots in the 2011 World Economic Forum’s ranking of competitiveness in the travel and tourism industry, moving from 74th place in 2009 to 69th this year among a total of 129 countries, mainly thanks to improvements in its business climate and tourism infrastructure. Compared within Latin America, Peru is in ninth place, below Mexico, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Panama, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.
The Canadian office of the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism had a banner year in 2010, welcoming 19,499 Canadians, the highest number of recorded visitors for the destination from this market. Arrivals from Canada were up 13 percent over 2009, due in part to additional lift provided by WestJet’s new Toronto service to Grand Cayman.