Last week I attended a conference called TravelMart Latin America, which was held in the beautiful city of Cartagena, Colombia. This is an annual meet-up of travel suppliers, tour companies, airlines, hotel companies, and destination tourism offices. It’s most for the buying and selling of travel services, the making of business alliances, but I attended as a journalist to see what’s new and different.

The most striking thing was that although there were some signs of trouble here and there, most of these destinations have done rather well during the recession. Travel to the Galapagos is down some and Costa Rica saw a bit of a drop from their primary U.S. market the past two years, but in general it was the middle mass market that took a hit, not the luxury end of things. The consensus now is that 2012 is shaping up as a great year and business has picked up across the board.

Hotel News

One sure sign this region has plenty of confidence is the number of new hotels going up. Follow this link for a rundown of new hotels in Latin America in all price ranges, but on the luxury side some high-profile openings are on the way. A Wald0rf-Astoria is opening in Panama City, with a new Hilton almost right next to it. This is following the Westin Playa Bonita that opened earlier this year. Starwood just announced a deal to open a W hotel there a few years down the line.

There hasn’t been much to talk about in Buenos Aires for a while, but that will change when the owners of Alvear Palace open the Alvear Art Hotel in 2013.

Next country over, in Chile, is where more of the action is these days. We recently reviewed the new Singular in Patagonia and are working on adding a review of Tierra Patagonia as well. (Sister hotel of the highly acclaimed Tierra Atacama.) We’ve also got a writer checking out new boutique hotel Lastaria in Santiago. After that we’ll be looking into a new boutique hotel in Valparaiso, Rufugio way out on Chiloe, and a few others in Patagonia.

Then there’s Peru, where an all-out building craze shows no signs up letting up. New chain hotels are coming to Lima and Mountain Lodges of Peru is opening a new place in Cusco, but we’re most excited about the opening of Hotel B in the hopping Barranco neighborhood early next year. Also, the long-promised renovation of Palacio del Inka hotel in Cusco is in motion now. It will be part of the Starwood Luxury Collection.

Most of the recent openings in Uruguay have been near the coast, but we’re excited to see a Sofitel Montevideo on the way in November.

Next month I’m off to Ecuador and will be reviewing two high-profile openings: Mashpi Lodge on a nature reserve and Casa Gangotena in Quito.

I got to check out a few boutique hotels in Cartagena, Colombia that make up the Evoca group. The photo here is from hotel LM. Outside the old city though, chain hotels are doubling down: new ones are coming from Hyatt, Intercontinental, and others. W Bogota is under construction now in the capital.

Four new resorts and lodges are on the way in Belize, so we’ll be keeping an eye on them to see which ones are upscale enough for our readers.

I’ve also got to update some hotel reviews to show expansions from the likes of Tabacon in Costa Rica and Mansion del Angel in Ecuador, as well as changes like Casitas del Colca moving from Orient-Express to Sonesta.

New suite at Tabacon

Travel and Tours

Did you know you can visit Antarctica by air, avoiding the dreaded Drake Passage? There’s a company called Antarctica XXI that does an “air cruise” leaving from Punta Arenas and landing at the edge of the continent. Then you get on a ship and go from place to place.

Mountain Lodges of Peru is opening one of their lodges along the Lares Trek in the Sacred Valley. This will allow people to have a base from which to hike to villages or to combine it with camping—the way it’s done now.

Copa Air, which is now part of the Star Alliance, is continuing to add new routes from their hub in Panama City. New ones are Las Vegas, Liberia (Costa Rica), Recife (Brazil), and Iquitos (Peru).

Quito’s new airport is now scheduled to open in February, 2013. The most positive development there is that there’s going to be a park-n-ride kind of service where you can catch a shuttle bus from central Quito.

As for new and interesting tours, I liked a Guatemalan glamping tour from Viaventure where you dine with candlelight in the isolated Mayan ruins of Uaxactún and sleep there (in real beds) in the evening. I learned about an array of interesting trip in Uruguay run by the Lares Group and several companies are running 4X4 self-driving trips in Patagonia that are a nice cross between independent travel and an organized tour.

SA Luxury Expeditions is doing some neat things in Peru, from Lima tours that dine in historic homes in the center to a “Potato Passion” tour and a Lake Titicaca islands tour with a home stay.

Although it hasn’t made them very popular with some neighbors, quiet and reasonable Uruguay has decided to get reasonable on policy as well: drug policy. They could become the first country in the Americas to distinguish between soft drugs and hard drugs, legalizing the one that’s less destructive than alcohol: marijuana.

In late June Uruguay took the step many economists and policy wonks have been pushing for decades: state control of marijuana sales. In theory, this will boost government revenues, destroy profits for cartels, and lead to a lot less killing for said profits. Almost everyone expects this to work (prohibition in the U.S. was a good experiment in the opposite direction, with alcohol), but few politicians have been brave enough to try it on a national level.

As any concert promoter will tell you, marijuana is a mellow drug. Pot smokers don’t start fights, they don’t kill or steal to fund their not-very-expensive habit, and they smile a lot. Treating this weed the same as something produced in a lab to be ultra-addictive is like pretending eating too much fresh pineapple is the same as eating too many Pringles.

Will Punta del Este attract even more partying rock bands? Will even more of the toking wealthy elite relocate there? Who knows, but it’s hard to see how this will get more than a shrug from the people already there, expat or otherwise. After all, it’s not like the Dutch have been driven into chaos by being, well, reasonable.

Real the full report here from the BBC: Uruguay Aims to Legalize Marijuana

Punta del Este has long been the see and be seen hotspot in South America. In no other beach area do so many of the rich and famous from multiple countries gather to take a break from their roles as captains of industry,  fashion, and entertainment. We just posted a detailed round-up of real estate in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

For a long time those numbers were limited, but as much of the world has gotten richer—especially in the bottom half of South America—the number of people wanting to stake out their spot in this location has taken off. That has made a hot real estate market even hotter. Numbers are bandied about like “$5 million in sales per day” (I’ve seen higher reports in some magazines) and “sales up 110% since 2010.”

We’ve seen this kind of fast appreciation before in Latin America and often it hasn’t ended well. In some places prices have gone through a correction (Panama City, Roatan, Ambergris), in others they’ve fallen off a cliff (many coastal Pacific retirement communities). The difference in Punta del Este is that much of the new buyer money is not coming from the U.S., Canada, or even Europe. It’s coming from increasingly wealthier Brazilians, Chileans, and Argentines who look at real estate as their only good inflation hedge.

So while this market has some typical signs of a bubble, it doesn’t look like it could pop anytime soon. Many of the prime beach properties in Jose Ignacio are owned by old money families with no intention to sell. Even if you’ve got a few million dollars to spend, your options depend on knowing someone in the know who can access the unlisted listings. A large number of the buyers are from developing countries on the rise. Uruguay’s residency, tax, and banking laws are some of the most attractive in the world. In an area where every house and villa is occupied in high season, the rental market is excellent.

And what’s the alternative? Brazil may have better beaches, but there’s nowhere else on the continent where so many power brokers and tastemakers (and their families of course) mix it up on vacation.

See our full story on luxury real estate in Punta del Este.

The January issue of Condé Nast Traveler has their Gold List, which contains the top hotels in each region based on reader surveys. I don’t tend to trust reader surveys very much since ball0t-stuffing is so rampant. As one experienced hotel PR agency person once said to me, “Most people who are going to take an hour to fill out a magazine survey are the ones who have a vested interest in who wins.”

In regions where there isn’t a whole lot of high-end competition, however, the best hotels—or at least the ones that are the best-known—tend to bubble to the top. This year EVERY hotel cited for South America has already been reviewed by Luxury Latin America. Here’s the full list, with direct links to our detailed, professional reviews.

Alvear Palace – Argentina
Four Seasons Buenos Aires – Argentina
Palacio Duhua Park Hyatt – Argentina
Cavas Wine Lodge – Argentina

Kanantik Reef & Jungle Resort – Belize

Hotel Fasano Sao Paulo – Brazil

Hotel Salto Chico – Chile

Sofitel Santa Clara – Colombia

El Silencio Lodge & Spa – Costa Rica
Four Seasons Costa Rica
Lapa Rios Ecolodge and Wildlife Refuge – Costa Rica
Xandari Resort & Spa – Costa Rica

Hotel Museo Casa Santo Domingo – Guatemala

Hotel Monasterio – Peru
Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel – Peru
Libertador Palacio del Inka – Peru

Four Seasons Carmelo – Uruguay

Sure, there are some great luxury hotels and resorts missing from this list that we could argue are better than some on here, but these are all fine places to stay for sure. Read our reviews to see which ones are right for you on a future vacation.

Last week I noted that we had just added a new review of a seaside boutique hotel in Uruguay. Now we’ve added another notable recent opening to our reviews of the best hotels in Uruguay with Fasano Las Piedras.

We’ve had our eye on this one for a while as it’s an offshoot of two of the best-known design hotels in Brazil: the Fasano hotels in Rio and Sao Paulo. While those are all about flash and bold artistry, Fasano Las Piedras near Punta del Este is more of a laid-back country retreat.

It’s not on the beach and it’s not in Punta del Este proper. This is a destination hotel situated on nearly 1,000 acres. It’s 15 minutes from the coast, but a different part of Uruguay entirely. If you want room to wander, you’ll find it here, plus I can’t think of another hotel where the swimming pool is inside a giant boulder. Sure, you’ve got a great spa, elegant restaurant, and a 9-hole Arnold Palmer golf course going in, but it’s the wide-open spaces that make you slow down and notice the little things.

“It’s a hotel that unveils its secrets to you over time, in layers. On the surface, it seems very minimal, discreet. The more you explore, the more you notice details in service and amenities that make you realize that you really are in a high-caliber hotel. And before you know it, you find that the place has at some point gotten under your skin and you have become completely enchanted.”

There are flashier resorts in Uruguay, for sure, but for many travelers who have seen the inside of a lot of those types already, this Fasano retreat comes out on top as the preferred address.

See our full review of hotel Fasano Las Piedras in Uruguay.