The Jamaica Tourism Board informed this week that a group of Spanish hotel chains are currently pouring a figure in the neighboring of $600 million into the building of a baker’s dozen new hotels on the island nation. More recently, Iberostar Hotels & Resorts decided to invest $100 million to construct a new 950-room resort in Rose Hall specially designed for family travel.

Honduras’s major sightseeing cities are sporting an 80 percent occupancy rate in most of the hotels, with scores of Central American trekkers –mostly hailing from El Salvador and Guatemala- checking in, said Anastasio Anastassious, president of the Honduras Hotel Association (AHAH is the Spanish acronym). Mr. Anastassious noted there’re still accommodations available for Holy Week vacationers willing to book a hotel room in the country.

Air Madrid, an airline owned by Spain-based Optursa Group, is weighing the possibility of building hotels in those cities it flies to, that according to Jose Luis Carrillo, the company’s president, CEO and only shareholder. During the grand opening of Air Madrid’s first nonstop flight to Argentina’s Buenos Aires, Mr. Carrillo confirmed his enterprise’s expansion plans to open new establishments and bring up the tally to 37 lodgings, all of them run by Global Hotels, its own hotel chain.

British hotel chain Intercontinental has just sold 73 hotels for €1.4 billion to a group led by Lehman Brothers. This operation is part of a strategic overhaul wielded by the company to manage and franchise hotels rather than own them altogether. The firm’s front office indicated the surplus generated by the transaction will be shared among all stockholders at the end of this year’s second quarter. The British hotel chain has already doled out ₤767 million among its shareholders.