Guatemala´s Tourism Up 34 Percent So Far This Year

A grand total of 803,601 foreign vacationers visited Guatemala between January and August this year, a whopping 34 percent increase from the first eight months of 2003, official sources told Caribbean News Digital this week.

Guatemala, a Central American country that came in for little more than 600,000 visitors and tallied up $325.9 million in revenues in the first eight months of 2003, is this time around revving up on its bid to crack the one-million-tourist plateau for the first time in history.

The largest number of Central American trippers, 65.5 percent from last year, came from Panama and Belize, while trekkers from the Middle East were up fifty percent.