LLA August 09
Luxury Latin America Newsletter
August 2009 |
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I hope you have been having a wonderful summer. Parts of Latin America have not been affected too much by the global slum--most are a great value. But others, especially Mexico and Honduras, have been hit hard by a combination of fewer vacationers and negative perceptions of what's happening in the news. Meanwhile, our visitor traffic is still increasing across the board, which means our readers are still looking for travel ideas for the whole region.
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New Hotel Reviews for Mexico
| I spent part of my summer taking Spanish lessons in the lovely city of Guanajuato with my family and while I was there I took some side trips to review the Quinta Real hotels in Aguascalientes and Zacatecas. There are few foreign tourists in these cities even when times are good, but these two hotels are fine places to stay if you make it to the colonial heartland.
I also spent a lot of time on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. Playa del Carmen city was still fairly busy, but a lot of individual resorts were not. I was fortunate enough to arrive soon after the openings of three notable new resorts. We've got reviews of Hacienda Tres Rios, Grand Velas Riviera Maya, and the spectacular new Banyan Tree Mayakoba. See the Cancun/Rivera Maya section for the links. Look for a real estate feature on the villas of the latter soon too.
In the next couple weeks we'll be posting additional reviews for Los Cabos. Stay tuned!
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What's New in Latin America?
| * Judging by all the e-mails I'm getting from businesses in Honduras, the bad news from the coup is having a big effect in places where it shouldn't: Roatan and Copan. I think our readers are savvier travelers than most though, so do a little digging and you'll find that there's been no disruption in those areas. You can even fly direct to Roatan if you want to skip the cities.
* When I was in Belize this summer I heard rumors of...paving! Word is that they're really going to finish paving that road to Placencia before the next decade and then after that the asphalt trucks may even make it up to the Cayo District. Could it be that the country really wants to attract people who aren't scuba divers or cruise ship passengers?
* Just in case you were wondering, no, we are not adding Venezuela. Chavez just nationalized the leading coffee producer, he just shut down 31 independent news outlets, and the new Mercer report pegged Caracas as the most expensive city in Latin America---mostly because fist-world imports are getting so expensive.
*Argentina still isn't collecting the reciprocity visa fee they announced last year. Cooler heads have prevailed. Meanwhile, the Argentine peso is knocking on 4 to the dollar, a historic high.
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Coming Soon and...Twitter
I checked out Machaca Hill in Belize and was quite impressed, so that's going into our hotel reviews shortly, along with a feature story on Belize. I'm also updating the reviews of the Francis Ford Coppola properties there. We've got two correspondents heading to Brazil this month to help us stretch out beyond the big cities. We'll also have a real estate report from a coastal region there.
In the coming months we've got writers bringing us new stories and reviews from Mexico, the Galapagos, Patagonia, and even El Salvador.
Subscribe to the RSS stream of the Luxury Latin America Blog to keep up on additions to our coverage and the latest in Latin America travel trends. If you're into Twitter, you can follow us there too, at LuxLatinAmerica.
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Regards,
Timothy Scott
Editor, Luxury Latin America
305-428-2681
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