Venezuela will play home to the Second Ecological Tourism Expo scheduled for Oct. 29 to Nov. 1. The event, backed up by the World Tourism Organization, will take place at the Intercontinental Guyana Hotel in the state of Bolivar.

Exhibition space will be divided in three main areas embracing Coasts and Islands, Jungles and Plains, and Mountains.

The Third International Congress on the Spanish Language will take place in the Argentina city of Rosario on Nov. 2004 under a slogan reading Linguistic Identity and Globalization.

The list of would-be personalities attending the event includes Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, Argentina’s Hector Tizon and Spanish intellectual Francisco Ayala, let alone a good deal of philologists, mass media organizations and scholars.

The New York Times is launching its first trade and consumer travel event, called The New York Times Travel Show, to be held February 27 - 29, 2004 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.

To kick-off the weekend, a panel discussion with travel industry leaders, called The Global Tourism Summit, is scheduled for the morning of Friday, February 27, 2004.

The International Meeting Industry Standardization Institute (ISMI) with the auspices and support of the Costa Rican Association of Professional Congress Organizers, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute, the International Congress and Convention Association and the Fairs Association of the Americas, will hold the 1st. International Symposium -- Workshop on the "Creation of International Regulations and Standards for the Events Industry," that will take place in San Jose, Costa Rica, March 30 - April 2, 2004.

Organizers of the first Cuban-US Travel Conference called it an historic event that began an intensification of the process to lift the Washington-imposed travel prohibitions.

The two-day conference in Cancun, Mexico, was organized by ATRIP (Association of Tourist Related Industry Professionals) and other US organizations in favor of ending these limitations. Participants included travel agents, tour operators, airlines, cruise companies, and legal firms, among others.

With its record number of attendees, the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals´ (HFTP) Annual Convention & Tradeshow was a great success. The final count came to 753 attendees, making this the largest attendance for the 51-year-old event that took place October 15*18 at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Fla.