Daily 12 March/März - ITB Berlin

XX Friday 12 March ITB Berlin English Daily 2010
2012 with a new property, O’Chheuteal Beach Resort & Casino, a 560-room resort
spread over 65 hectares with 2.4 kilometres of beachfront. Sihanoukville currently has
only two international standard hotels, the five-star Sokha Beach Resort and the
Independent Hotel. Regular fights from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap are
likely to be underway by the middle of this year, according to airport company SCA.
AFRICA/MIDDLE EAST
World Cup offers Lesotho sustainable tourism opportunities
A one-off social enterprise, Lesotho2010, has been set up to make sure that the independent
nation inside South Africa can fully participate in and benefit from the 2010
World Cup. Despite beautiful, unspoilt scenery, Lesotho remains exceptionally poor,
largely unvisited and unknown. It sees the World Cup as a real opportunity to start
developing sustainable livelihoods for its people through tourism.
Lesotho2010 is pulling together all the country’s tourism agencies to create complete
packages (1-4 days), focusing on hiking, pony trekking, fly fishing, quad-biking, skiing,
abseiling and of course football – tourists will be given the opportunity to play football
against local teams. Lesotho2010 will arrange accommodation, transfers from
Bloemfontein and Durban, internal transport, food, accommodation and activities. A
new homestay programme has been developed and a website launched. Lesotho2010
will deal both directly with the travelling public or with the travel trade.
German airlines eye up Iraq and Lebanon
Since 6 February this year, Germany’s second largest airline, Air Berlin, has been operating
a once-weekly service between Munich and Arbil or Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq
using a Boeing 737-800. The airline plans to increase frequencies from this summer.
Lufthansa is also planning to return to Iraq’s capital after an absence of 20 years. It
started flying to Baghdad in 1956 but discontinued its flights in 1990 at the start of the
first Gulf War. The German carrier will serve two destinations – Baghdad and Erbil –
from both Frankfurt and Munich, with an expected start by the middle of the year. The
Lufthansa Group is already present in Iraq thanks to its subsidiary Austrian Airlines. The
Vienna-based carrier was the first Western airline to resume services to Iraq.
In another development, German carrier Germania is also starting up services to the
Middle East; it has just received traffic rights to serve the Berlin-Beirut route starting on
11 March. The airline, which already flies to Syria, plans to operate two flights a week to
the Lebanese capital.