The Sixth Caribbean Media Exchange on Sustainable Tourism (CMEx) will unfold from June 24 to 28 in St. Lucia, according to a confirmation made by Counterpart International, the event’s top organizer.

The St. Lucia conference will be a follow-up to the previous five meetings that got cracking for the first time on October 2001 with the intention of gathering press professionals specialized in the realm of tourism. The other media exchanges were held in the Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica.

Congress, seminar and meeting tourism in Uruguay was up a whopping 32.8 percent in 2003 from the year before, the Uruguayan Association of Congress and Related Event Organizers (AUDOCA) reported.

During the course of last year, Uruguay played host to 470 events, including 179 of international scope. Each attendant to those congresses averaged $1,400 worth of revenues for the country’s coffers.

Around 81 percent of those conclaves took place in Montevideo, little more than 9 percent in Punta del Este, and the remaining 10 percent in other cities around the nation.

People from nearly all European nations will huddle from April 24 to 28 at the Maho Beach Resort & Casino tourist compound in St. Maarten to catch the Dutch Caribbean Meets Europe (DCME) event.

Under a motto reading “The Dominican Republic Is All The Rage,” the 2004 DATE, the annual tourist meeting, will get underway from April 28 to 30 at the Plaza Playa Dorada Commercial Center in Puerto Plata. Members of the local National Hotel & Restaurant Association (ASONAHORES) and the Council for Tourist Promotion (CTP) are confident this year’s turnout will go the 2003 edition one better by a long haul.

The Berlin International Tourism Fair (ITB) –one of the world’s largest tradeshows in the industry- will draw in this year a staggering 9,000 exhibitors and somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 specialized visitors, IPK International, the event’s organizer in Munich, estimates.

"Tourism enriches individuals, families, communities and all the world." This is a central, simple but straight-forward message of the new awareness campaign with which the World Tourism Organization (WTO) wants to raise awareness of the positive impacts tourism can have on life, culture and economy, in short on society at all levels.

The "Tourism Enriches" campaign was launched at the First World Conference on Tourism Communications (TOURCOM) end of January in Madrid. "This is the