| All News |
| If you want to see all news from the last 100 days in order by date,
click here. |
|
| Search News |
| Enter any query and search the aviation news database |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
International
Aviation News |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| |
Cuban tourism season off to rough start
|
... The report, due to be released later this week, said arrivals were 254,845 in the first month of this year, compared with 268,115 in January 2009. It gave no further details.
Tourism and related businesses are an important source of income for the cash-strapped, communist-run Caribbean island, totaling more than $2 billion last year, or about 20 percent of Cuba´s foreign exchange income.
Foreign sources in the tourism industry blamed the January decline on a pricing spat with a major Canadian tour operator that reduced bookings from Canada, economic hard times in Europe and competition from lower-priced packages in the Dominican Republic and the Mexican resort of Cancun.
Slightly more than 2.4 million tourists visited Cuba last year, an increase of 3.5 percent over 2008. Of those, the biggest number 914,884 were Canadians.
The foreign manager of a Cuban hotel said tourist arrivals were down again in February and prospects for March were not encouraging because the response by tourism officials to January´s decline was too slow in coming.
"They are running around lowering their prices now but it´s too late through March," he said.
Also, other countries expecting fewer arrivals from Europe and the United States due to the global recession are trying to lure Canadian tourists.
"They have waged a price war for the Canadian market," the hotel manager said.
The U.S. market is largely off-limits to Cuba because the 48-year-long U.S. trade embargo against the island prohibits most Americans from traveling there. |
| |
| News material on the Site is copyright and belongs
to the Company or to its third party news provider, and all
rights are reserved. Any User who accesses such material may
do so only for its own personal use, and the use of such material
is at the sole risk of the User. Redistribution or other commercial
exploitation of such news material is expressly prohibited.
Where such news material is provided by a third party, each
User agrees to observe and be bound by the specific terms of
use applying to such news material. We do not represent or endorse
the accuracy or reliability of any of the info contained in
any news or external websites referred to in the news. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
