A brand-new fleet of topless, double-deck buses is making the rounds in Varadero to cater to tourists with a fixed timetable stretching from 9am to 9pm. The buses virtually tour the entire beach peninsula from the Paradiso Puntarena Hotel all the way to the northern tip of Punta Hicacos.The comfy vehicles offering the new Varadero Beach Tour make 42 regular stops properly marked during a one-hour-and-five-minute drive all along the beachfront hotel and service areas. The 20-kilometer-long tour is charged at $2 apiece. Passengers can take as many spins as they want at no extra charge.

The spanking-new LTI Panorama Hotel –whose futurist architecture juts out in the tourist expansion area of Miramar, a gardened neighborhood in western Havana- will start welcoming its very first guests in the first half of December, general manager Marcos Cardillos announced. The resort’s grand opening will happen in the early days of the island nation’s high-peak tourist season, a time of the year tourism authorities on the island have their hopes pinned on.“We know this is going to be a tough challenge. However, we count on a young but highly talented and experienced staff. We know the Cuban market pretty well due to the years we’ve been working in it, and this gives us an edge to quicken our management,” the exec commented as he downplayed the fact that the new lodging facility does not appear in many wintertime brochures.

The number of tourists flocking to Panama’s destinations was up by 5.7 percent in the first eight months of 2002 compared to the same period the year before. Some 512,000 travelers visited the nation from January to August. Estimates for the whole year are fixed in roughly 800,000 visitors.This nation offers such choices as tourism in cultural and ethnical areas, as well as shopping sprees at the Colon Free Trade Zone in the Atlantic coastline and tours to cities like Panama and David, the latter on the Costa Rican border.

U.S. hotel chain Best Western (BW) added 37 new resorts in North America and 38 other facilities around the globe in the third fiscal quarter of 2002 that came to an end last August 31. Minneapolis, Montreal, Syracuse, Brussels, Oslo, Hamburg, Suez and Valencia are just some of the cities where the hotel chain has opened up spanking-new establishments.BW has begun operations in 34 hotels in the U.S. and three in Canada. The expansion effort in the United States includes such interesting facilities as Best Western IPG Florida Homes (55 residences of three to five rooms each) in Clermont (Florida); Best Western Brooklyn Center Inn (210 rooms) in Minneapolis; Best Western Raleigh North (139 rooms) in Raleigh (North Carolina) and Best Western Downtown Convention Center (100 rooms) in Nashville (Tennessee).

Unable to overcome an array of economic mishaps, National Airlines –the U.S. cargo carrier- was bound to cease operations. The company, that used to provide service from Las Vegas to New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco with a payroll of 1,500 workers, stopped flying last Wednesday.

Unable to overcome an array of economic mishaps, National Airlines –the U.S. cargo carrier- was bound to cease operations. The company, that used to provide service from Las Vegas to New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco with a payroll of 1,500 workers, stopped flying last Wednesday.