Last Wednesday April 17 ‘Splendour of the Seas’ and its 1.940 passengers marked the end of the 2012/13 cruise season for Uruguay, which took off on 23 October and totalled 222 calls between the port of Montevideo and Punta del Este sea resort.
An investigation is under way after two explosions near the finishing line of the Boston Marathon left three people dead and more than 100 injured. The FBI has taken over co-ordination of what it described as a “potential terrorist inquiry”.
The ongoing controversy in Uruguay as to how ‘modest’ or ‘bad’ was this summer’s season has received some facts to support the discussion: supermarket sales in Punta del Este-Maldonado the main resort area along the Atlantic coast contracted 15%, compared to the previous year, while overall in the whole of the country sales were down 2%.
Costa Cruises accepted a one million Euros fine as part of a settlement with the Italian government that would dismiss possible criminal charges for last year's ‘Costa Concordia’ shipwreck, which killed 32 people.
One person was missing Wednesday afternoon after high winds in Mobile, Alabama, caused the disabled cruise ship Carnival Triumph to break loose from its dock, officials said. An official with the city's fire department said the missing man and another person were in a guard shack that was blown into Mobile River. One man has been recovered from the water.
The number of cruise-vessel calls in Uruguayan ports has increased 9.3% so far in this 2012/13 season with an influx of 20 million dollars for the local economy revealed Deputy minister of Tourism Antonio Carambula during a primary evaluation of business vis-à-vis the 2011/12 results.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) signed a special Joint Statement on Aviation and Tourism acknowledging the intention of the two UN agencies to begin cooperating more closely on issues of common priority.
A new report, put out earlier this month by the World Economic Forum, has ranked which countries roll out the welcome mat to travellers and which give the cold shoulder. The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2013 ranked 140 countries according to attractiveness and competitiveness in the travel and tourism industries.
Workers of Spanish airline Iberia called off further strikes in a dispute over thousands of job cuts after unions accepted a mediation plan, the company announced in a statement.
This year’s Falkland Islands season has been much quieter than usual with over 19.000 passengers to the first week of March mainly because of cancellations due to weather and technical issues with a handful related to the political situation created by Argentine harassment early on the season, according to industry sources in the Islands.