OCHO RIOS, Jamaica — Organisers of the annual Sandals Latin America Travel Agents Golf Tournament have hailed it a great success, saying all their goals were achieved at its fourth staging held at the Sandals Golf and Country Club.

The two-day event, which was held on Tuesday and Wednesday, saw nearly 100 golfers from Latin America participating in the tournament.

Teams played in a four-man scramble format, putting their skills to the test competing in various competitions throughout the tournament.

At the end of the tournament, Team Two, which comprised Manuel Garcia, Ignacio Vidal, Andres Vicuna and Claudio Cruz from Chile, were crowned the overall champions.

They tallied a score of 132 points of which 65 came on the first day and 67 on the second and final day of the competition.

“Surprisingly, our team members met here (Sandals Ochi Beach Resort) as we never met before. We comprehended well and the caddies from the golf course helped us a lot. We are just happy to come out the winners,” Vidal said.

Team 13 from Mexico (Magaly Arellianes, Carlos Henriquez, Elizabeth Pedraza and Adrian Carrera), who scored 68 points each on both days, finished second on 136 points.

Other notable winners were Claudio Cruz (closest to the pin — male), Erika Pacheco (closest to the pin — female), Adrian Carrera (longest drive — male) and Alejandra Newmann (longest drive — female).

Miguel Arthurs, general manager of the Sandals Golf and Country Club, said that he was pleased with how the tournament finished as the golfers really got behind the event and they were able to surpass funds raised last year.

“The overall tournament was a resounding success. The intention of the tournament is to showcase Jamaica’s golf and Jamaica’s tourism. But the other side of it again is to really help our Sandals Foundation junior programme through fund-raising, and both were very successful.

“The Travel Agents had a lot of fun; they learned the changes we made to the golf course but more importantly, they had fun participating in our fund-raising activities. We surpassed what we achieved last year and we will now put that money in the kitty for the Junior programme. We targeted US$1,000 and we got close to that,” Arthurs said.

Ramel Sobrino, general manager at Sandals Ochi Beach Resort, said that this year’s staging was the most successful one and they are already looking forward to a more exciting tournament next year.

“This is the fourth year in the tournament and it is very interesting to see that each year it is increasing in numbers of travel agents and some other nationalities. We started with eight, then there were nine and this year, we had 12 nationalities participating in the tournament.

“This year’s event overall was fantastic; we have achieved our goals; we surpassed the proceeds we made last year and that is a good sign and we had nearly 100 travel agents in this particular tournament this year.

“With the energy that I observed over the last three years of the tournament, I believe that we are going to have an increase, not only in numbers of the Latin American guests visiting the resorts in all of the islands we operate including Jamaica, but I expect also a serious percentage increase in participants for our next tournament next year,” Sobrino told the Jamaica Observer.

Silvio Paez, director of sales for Latin America, was also pleased with the turnout for the tournament.

“I see this as a vision of our Chairman ‘Butch’ Stewart and [Deputy Chairman] Adam Stewart as they decided to invest in the region because there are some important American markets among them like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Panama, countries in Central American, Colombia and Mexico, and as well as those, we are developing some other countries like Puerto Rico and Bolivia and we are pushing up sales.

“So the vision of the chairman and his son is to support the Travel Agents communities in Latin America. Not all of them are professionals in golf but the success has been amazing, it was a tremendous tournament,” Paez said.