The U.S. government decided to stiffen entry controls for foreigners planning to visit the country and ordered its embassies all around the world to conduct one-on-one interviews with most visa applicants before their passports are stamped, an action that has raised quite a number of eyebrows within the tourist industry in anticipation to the negative impact it could have.
A State Department spokesperson said up to now non-immigrant visa applicants were bound to meet with a consular official, but that procedure was often brushed aside in the past.
Spanish airline Iberia is expected to name Fernando Conte Garcia, 53, as its new president next June 12 after serving his tenure as a member of the company’s Management Council and independent counselor for Amadeus since March 2001. Mr. Garcia will replace Xabier de Irala, who handed in his resignation to the Management Council after seven years at the helm of Iberia. Caribbean News Digital has learned that Angel Mullor, the man whose successful joint efforts with Mr. Irala helped put Iberia among the elite of Europe’s most profitable companies, will continue working for the Spanish air carrier.
Festival Cruises –the company led by Santiago Labrador in Spain, Portugal and Hispanic America- has just opened its new headquarters in Madrid on the 16.8 milestone of the Coruña Road in a redolent and functional three-story building perched on an acre of land hedged with a small garden and private parking lot.
In Mr. Labrador’s opinion, Festival’s innovative offices can’t be any better for the company’s peculiar features because its three floors are partitioned for a similar number of working groups to operate independently.
Barceló Hotels & Resorts unveiled the line of products it has made it big with in Latin America, and its Barceló Reservation Station coupled with the brand-new website www.barcelo.com for professionals and the general public to scour and download simplified info on all of the company’s products and services.
Some of the offers include both beachfront and urban hotels, plus all possibilities waiting for would-be travelers in the Caribbean as far as conventions and incentives are concerned.
BWIA will start Thursday a series of regular flights from Trinidad & Tobago to Costa Rica, a move that will enhance tourist exchanges with the Caribbean nation, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT) reported.
The air carrier –now covering 23 destinations in the Caribbean and in several cities from the United States, U.K., Venezuela and Canada- will make a couple of weekly flights to San Jose with a fleet of Airbus A 340-300 (seating 284 passengers) and seven Boeing 737-800 (154 seats) aircraft.
A feature report entitled “The Tourist Routes of El Hacho and the Forts” suggesting rural trails down the municipality of Ceuta, has given author Pablo-Ignacio de Dalmases one of the Ceuta journalism prizes in its first edition.
The awards were handed over in an event held in the city the prize has been named after by a jury made up of, among others, the burg’s tourism counselor Aida Piedra and Alejandro Fernandez Pombo, chairman of the Spanish Media Organizations Federation.