Carlos Villota has taken over as the new general manager of Gran Meliá Volcan Lanzarote. Before this new appointment, Mr. Villota was serving a stint as general manager of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel, Cuba’s standard-bearing resort. In the course of his career, Mr. Villota has acted as deputy general manager of the Gran Meliá Salinas and general manager of the Meliá Tamarindos and the Meliá San Felipe.

Dot-com travel agencies racked up significant gains in 2002 thanks to online sales of travel bookings and tourist packages during the past holiday season. The main scorers were eDream.com and Viajarabajoprecio.com whose 40 to 50 percent spikes pushed sale revenues up to 144 percent for Spain-based agency Rumbo.

Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, the world’s number-one reservation dealer (GDS) and technology provider for the travel industry, is trumpeting the launch of its brand-new Amadeus Learning City in 30 countries scattered around the five continents.

Through the implementation of this system, travel agents interested in enhancing their knowledge of the Amadeus Network’s products and operations –and bound to jack up their own output levels- can now choose between traditional in-school training or a click on the company’s interactive website.

Air France is currently testing a new fingerprint-based biometrics technique with passengers leaving for Tel Aviv at the gateway of the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris. The voluntary experiment’s goal is to make sure that an Air France customer who dispatched a suitcase is the same passenger boarding the plane later on.

Vacacionar Travel S.A., a travel agency with tour operators all around the globe specialized in tourist promotion towards the Caribbean, will soon hand in the 2002 Pyramid Award to its service providers in Cuba.

The agency sell hotel reservations, tourist packages, car rentals and plane tickets as easy as clicking on www.vacacionartravel.com, its own website.

Despite having a bludgeoning cruise industry of its own, Guatemala expects to receive 24 tourist vessels this year in its ports serving the Caribbean Sea with the arrival of the first ship –a Dutch-flagged vessel- following four years of mothballed operations caused by the devastating Mitch hurricane back in 1998.