Puerto Vallarta, June 12, 2014 – The Fourth edition of the LGBT Business Expo, Latin America’s leading LGBT business event, opened in Puerto Vallarta’s Marriott CasaMagna today with local and international leaders joining the celebration, including Joseph Mark Pomper,

Vacationing again! The newlyweds are reportedly enjoying another romantic getaway in Punta Mita.

The honeymooning is not over for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West!

Two weeks after tying the knot the happy couple have extended their newlywed bliss with a trip to Mexico, according to multiple reports.

The parents of North West are currently enjoying the sunny skies for their "official" honeymoon, sources told Us Weekly.

In new photos, the hot mama was spotted poolside in Puerto Vallarta sunbathing in a revealing white bikini next to her husband.

Kardashian and West are staying in a private residence, and are also reportedly celebrating the now 37-year-old rapper's birthday.

Mrs. West took to Instagram to wish her beau a very special heartfelt message Sunday.

"Happy Birthday to my husband and best friend in the entire world! You have changed my life in more ways than you know," the 33-year-old reality starlet sweetly wrote.

"The way you look at life inspires me! I love you so much!!!"

After the pair's lavish wedding ceremony on May 24 in Florence, the two jet-setted off to Ireland and Prague for their initial post-wedding vacation.

Reports swirled that Kardashian didn't have a good time due to the "gloomy" weather, however, the brunette beauty took to Twitter after she returned home to express that she had no qualms about the getaway.

"Had the best, most relaxing romantic honeymoon in Ireland & Prague!"

[readon1 url="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-official-honeymoon-mexico-report-article-1.1825085"]Source:www.nydailynews.com[/readon1]

The St. Regis Punta Mita Resort and Punta Mita Expeditions are ready to welcome the II Annual Punta Mita Beach Festival, taking place July 17 – 20, 2014. The celebratory summer event takes full advantage of the renowned beachfront resort’s unparalleled destination.

	Photo courtesy of Thinkstock

Have you heard of Punta Mita?  The stars in Hollywood sure have.  Now apparently, Kimye (Kim Kardashian and Kanye West) have rented a house for Kanye’s 37th birthday. So where is this town that, according to sources, is a favorite spot of the Kardashian Clan and many others in the celebrity realm?

Location
About a 40 minute trip north from Puerto Vallarta sits the beach community of Punta de Mita.  Boasting 9.5 miles of beaches and surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean, Punta Mita sits about the same latitude as the Hawaiian Islands. Temps average in the mid 80s for most of the year, yielding a very appealing but quiet getaway.

Getting There
Flights come to Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport in Puerto Vallarta daily.  The International Airport is capable of handling up to 40 flights an hour, and is currently expanding to add 6 more gates.  Transportation to your final destination can be arranged via car/van or rentals are available.  Four wheel drive vehicles are the most popular here.

Lodging
There are around ten choices for accommodations in Punta Mita.  The Four Seasons Resort offers suite and full villa rentals and the St. Regis offers a full array of rooms and suites as well. Hotel Cinco is a boutique hotel offers an organic living experience right on the surf beach. Some of the best deals are to be found on the Vacation Rentals side, where you can get a 5 bedroom, 8 bath, sleeps 10, oceanfront home with a cook and maid for only $1,650 a night.  For those rates, you could bring the whole family and keep up with the Kardashians.

Speaking of which, their go-to locale is the same for Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria and more: Casa Aramara.  In the low season (July – Sept) the base rates are $15,000 a night with a five-night minimum.  Here is what you get for your “I could buy a car for that” amount of money: 12 Guest Rooms, 4 Ocean Front King Suites, 4 Garden Villa Double Rooms, 1 Guest Villa Master Suite, 1 Guest Villa King Room, 1 Guest Villa Double Room, and 1 Guest Triple Room.  Guests have access to spa treatments, scuba diving, whale watching, personal training, a 24-hour butler and two 5-star chefs.

Food and beverage
If you don’t plan on filming the next episode of your reality series at Casa Aramara, you are on your own for food.   

There are plenty of choices for cuisine in the area including Cafe des Artistes del Mar, located atop the Hotel Cinco, providing a farm-to-table experience  where the fish is brought in live daily.  Carolina at the St. Regis is a Five Diamond establishment featuring international cuisine with a local flare.  Serendipity Restaurant & Mezcaleria is going to be your stop for truly contemporary, inventive Mexican Cuisine.  There are no chips and guacamole here.

Things to do
Beyond the beach, sailing, surfing, and golf on two Jack Nicklaus courses are popular activities.  If you are lucky enough to visit from Mid-December through early April, check out the Humpback Whale watching.  The whales, who go there to calve, are known to breach right near your boat.  The local village offers shopping for resident artisans and a few art galleries have even opened recently. Day trips to Sayulita, Lo de Marcos, San Pancho, Playa Chacala and Puerto Vallarta are all available as well.  Marieta Islands are a quick boat ride away and very popular to view marine life as they are protected from fishing and hunting by the Mexican Government.

It is not surprising the A-listers like Punta Mita so much.  Armed with the info above, whether you are spending $150 or $15,000 a night, now you too can keep ahead of the Kardashians in Mexico.

[readon1 url="http://www.travelpulse.com/news/entertainment/keeping-ahead-of-the-kardashians-in-punta-mita.html"]Source:www.travelpulse.com[/readon1]

This small island, located near the Pacific coast of Mexico has a population of just over 800 inhabitants. According to local legend, Mexcaltitán was the ancestral home of the Aztecs .

Two years ago we had the Optinam 2012 in Valle de Bravo, Edo. de Mexico where we had around 200 Optimists and it was a great and successful experience for the international and local sailors as well as for the organizing committee.

Puerto Vallarta Mayor Ramón Guerrero Martínez recently announced—after Palmares Beach was recently awarded the Blue Flag—that two additional beaches (Holi and Mismaloya) are being readied for certification. “We hope to become the Mexican municipality with most certified beaches,” he commented in a recent public address.

The Blue Flag (blueflag.org) is a voluntary eco-label awarded to more than 4000 beaches and marinas in 48 countries across Europe, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, New Zealand, Brazil, North America and the Caribbean. The concept was born in France. In 1985, French coastal municipalities were awarded with the Blue Flag for complying with sewage treatment and bathing water quality criteria. Two years later,  the Foundation for Environmental Education in Europe presented the Frech model to the European Commission and the Blue Flag Program was launched. That same year, the Blue Flag was awarded to 244 beaches and 208 marinas in ten European countries. Certification lasts for a year, after which judges must re-visit each location to ensure that the criteria is met.

Beaches are awarded the Blue Flag based on compliance with 32 points, organized in four primary categories: Environmental Education and Information, Water Quality, Environmental Management, and Safety and Services. The organization provides tools and resources for Blue Flag beaches to promote the principles behind the award.

Less than 10 beaches in all of Mexico have received the Blue Flag. In Banderas Bay, two beaches have received the award: Nuevo Vallarta Beach through the period of June 2013 - June 2014, and Palmares Beach, south of Puerto Vallarta, from July 2014 - 2015. It is important to emphasize that many beaches in Banderas Bay that have not received this important award are fit for swimming and recreation, welcoming thousands of visitors every year. For a guide to Banderas Bay beaches, please click here.

[readon1 url="http://virtualvallarta.com/puertovallarta/news/local/puerto-vallarta-seeks-more-blue-flag-beach-certifi.shtml"]Source:/virtualvallarta.com[/readon1]

There's a reasonable chance that some of you who are reading this first got the cruise bug by watching the TV series The Love Boat in the late 1970s.

If that was a fun decade, the actors had more than their share of it on the Pacific Princess (a.k.a. The Love Boat) as it sailed the Mexican Riviera from Los Angeles, with stops in Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta and, yes, sometimes all the way south to Acapulco.

That original Pacific Princess was dismantled and scrapped last year in Turkey, but it holds a lot of memories for many early cruisers and TV viewers. The show played on Saturday nights on ABC and was paired with Fantasy Island.

For some reason, I thought the celebrity guests on the show were in the "B" category. But it appears not when you find people like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Hanks and Don Ameche all made appearances.

Gavin MacLeod, the skipper, and Lauren Tewes, the cruise director, are probably pleased to know that the Mexican Riviera is making a comeback after five years of diminishing numbers, fuelled by reports of violence and a collapsing U.S. economy that arguably hit California harder than any other state.

Cruisecritic.com offered a few facts about the demise:

"Puerto Vallarta went from having a banner year in 2008, when 180 ships arrived, to a mere 82 in 2013. Mazatlan suffered a significant financial hit when a string of violent incidents prompted cruise lines to pull out completely in 2011, losing all of the 520,000 passengers that had visited in 2010."

Carnival announced last week it is going back with seven-day cruises in 2014-15 that include stops at Mazatlan. Princess has also put Mazatlan back into its Mexican Riviera schedule. The Riviera isn't just Mazatlan, of course, but it's an important cog in reviving the traditional Mexican Riviera sevenday cruise to those three ports. A major holdout so far is Royal Caribbean. All the line is saying is that it's continuing to weigh all options.

With Galveston and Houston thriving as ports and the Mexican Riviera back on the radar of at least some cruise lines, people living in the western half of North America now have more choices of ports closer to home.

Carnival has designated Long Beach, Calif., the year-round home port of the Carnival Miracle. While there are several itineraries, the first that includes Mazatlan departs on Nov. 8.

Princess won't have a year-round presence, but its Crown Princess and Grand Princess will be sailing the traditional seven-day cruises seasonally. Mexican Riviera cruises for Princess run from November to April, then again in the late fall of 2015 through the spring of 2016.

Norwegian's presence in Mexico will be mainly in fall and early winter.

It's clear the cruise lines believe in the recovering global economy and in anti-violence steps taken in Mexico, especially Mazatlan. If Carnival makes a success of its year-round presence, look for competitors to drop their anchors in Southern California yearround, too.

[readon1 url="http://www.leaderpost.com/travel/Mexican+Riviera+makes+comeback/9912720/story.html"]Source:www.leaderpost.com[/readon1]

Grupo Marival is celebrating Texas Week from June 10th through the 17th. Tour operator Funjet will fly 150 Texans to the destination to enjoy the party, which will also be attended by hotel guests and the local public.

As in years past, The River Cafe has just announced the seventh edition of their annual Garlic and Mango Summer Festival, to take place June 1 - July 31. During this time, the restaurant will feature a special menu with choice items in which garlic and mango are prominently used. To keep things simple, the prestigious restaurant follows a format similar to that of Restaurant Week, in which dinner guests have several choices of appetizers, main courses and desserts. The River Cafe throws in an additional amuse bouche for starters.

The special menu is available for lunch and dinner, and it costs $295 pesos per person

[readon1 url="http://virtualvallarta.com/puertovallarta/news/events/the-river-cafe-announces-annual-mango-fest-1406042.shtml"]Source:virtualvallarta.com[/readon1]

Guillermo del Toro Gómez is a critically acclaimed Mexican film director known for his fiction, fantasy and war films. The Mexican director is most known for his work on the Hellboy comic films and the fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth.

Guillermo del Toro joins the list of a wave of Mexican directors who took the American film industry by storm in the 1990s. He was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in October of 1964 and raised as a strict Catholic. At a very young age, del Toro decided to make a pact with the “monsters and ants” that lived in his room, agreeing to dedicate his life to them in exchange for doing him no harm. The result was a future horror director, who as a child made monster movies with a primitive camera and hand-built action figures. Eventually, del Toro would achieve remarkable success and international recognition in the film industry as a director and screenwriter. Remaining true to his word, Guillermo del Toro's main focus has always been on horror and fantasy films.

In the 1980s and 90s Guillermo del Toro exercised his passion for makeup design. The young budding director chose to study under Dick Smith, renowned makeup artist. For 8 years del Toro would work in the special effects industry, eventually opening his own company called Necropia. In 1984, Guillermo got his first taste of filmmaking by producing Dona Herlinda and Her Son. He went on to direct Mexican television programs, including a famous horror series, and teach film workshops. In 1986, del Toro solidified his love for film when he, along with other prominent names in Mexican film, co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival.

Guillermo del Toro's debut feature film, Cronos, was released in Mexico in February of 1992. The film won many awards and went on to represent Mexico in the 1993 Academy Awards. Next, del Toro was invited to direct a Hollywood film called Mimic (1997), an experience which would submit him to various confrontations with studio executives that would ultimately leave him unsatisfied. Soon afterwards, the Mexican film director would find himself obliged to relocate to Los Angeles after negotiating a ransom for the release of his kidnapped father in Mexico.

By 2001, the filmmaker returned to his independent roots with a film set during the Spanish Civil War called Devil's Backbone. The film, about a ghost haunting at an orphanage, was well received and positioned Guillermo del Toro to return to the Hollywood blockbuster film scene. The result was Blade II (2002), starring Wesley Snipes and Ron Perlman, who has appeared in many Guillermo del Toro films.

In the 2004 movie Hellboy, a comic book adaptation about a spawn of Hell raised by Nazis in World War II, del Toro had to fight studio directors to cast Perlman in the leading role. The comic book adaptation brought Guillermo del Toro true recognition as an international film director. The Mexican movie director would later return to direct the sequel: Hellboy II: the Golden Army (2008).

Pan' Labyrinth (2006), Guillermo del Toro's most successful film, is movie set in Spain about a young girl who escapes the harsh realities of life by creating her own adventurous fairy tale. Guillermo wrote and directed the critically acclaimed film that returned to the reoccurring Spanish Civil War motif found in his work. Pan's Labyrinth earned a 22 minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for six Academy Awards (for which it took home three) and a BAFTA (Best Film Not In English) Award, among many other recognitions.

Guillermo del Toro is a great example of the many Mexican film makers that gained enormous international respect during the period. Also in 2006, fellow Mexican directors Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuaron were also enjoying similar success with the films Babel and Children of Men respectively.

[readon1 url="http://www.donquijote.org/culture/mexico/film/guillermo-del-toro.asp"]Source:www.donquijote.org[/readon1]

Top publications Elite Travel and Bold Magazine dedicated pages to Mexico’s Pacific Treasure in May; the magazines are distributed in private jet hangars and first class airline lounges.

One of the most important goals the Riviera Nayarit Convention and Visitors Bureau has set for itself is to increase visitors from the Premium or super luxe segment.

The objective of reaching these readers with high purchasing power has been progressing gradually, but steadily. Recently, Elite Travel and Bold Magazine both printed proof of its success.

Elite Travel is published in the United States with a worldwide distribution. The magazine circulates in private jet hangars and first class lounges for major airlines.

Towards the end of May the magazine posted an article on its website where it highlighted the different celebrities who have visited the Riviera Nayarit, something that will eventually attract more visitors to this social arena.

Bold Magazine is a Canadian publication distributed in the Air Canada VIP lounge and in the country’s largest bookstore. Its quarterly circulation encourages intrepid travelers to visit the world’s most exclusive destinations.

Bold Magazine showcased the gastronomy, the luxury hotel infrastructure and the natural bounty of the Riviera Nayarit, running its article under the headline “Riviera Nayarit: A Little Piece of Paradise.”

From the article: “Under trekked, the Riviera Nayarit is an indigenous treasure emerging like most luxury Mexican finds; rugged & worthy of international recognition. ln recent years, the Riviera has quietly welcomed Mexican and international visitors drawn to its breathtaking views, healing seas and abundant gifts.”

This write-up in specific is a direct result of an Eco-Lux FAM trip undertaken last December by the Riviera Nayarit CVB.

Both publications represent the captive markets from the U.S. and Canada. The latter, by the way, has recently increased its influx of Premium and Luxury visitors to the Riviera Nayarit.

For a look at the articles, see the links below:
Destination Guides