The growth of winter tourism in Mexico will ‘cool’ its performance for this year’s December season, as it is expected to barely increase 0.9 percent compared to 2018, which would be its worst data for the same period in the last 6 years.
According to the forecasts of the Ministry of Tourism (Sectur), this slight increase is due, in part, to a greater number of available hotel rooms, as the offer of rooms grew 3 percent in the last twelve months.
Despite travel alerts that the US government has issued, Sectur expects a slight increase in American travelers of 1.4 percent.
For the last two weeks of December and the first of 2020, about 8 million tourists will stay in a hotel, particularly in the tourist centers with beaches like Cancun, with 571,000 visitors, Riviera Maya with 280,000 travelers, as well as Acapulco, with 593,000 tourists.
Nuevo Vallarta in Nayarit is the destination with the highest average occupancy, having 9 out of 10 of its rooms already reserved, while Puerto Vallarta will have 88.2 percent of its rooms occupied during the season.
Raúl Sapién, president of the National Council of Private Security (CNSP), warned that criminal activity in these tourist areas slows the arrival of foreign visitors.
Among the tourist destinations with the greatest effects, according to the CNSP, are Sonora, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Acapulco, Ixtapa and Mazatlan in Sinaloa.
At the end of 2018, according to data from the organization of private security companies, 70 percent of entrepreneurs in the tourism sector saw that the lack of security would affect the development of that economic activity.
The slowdown of winter tourism is the fall of 0.6 percent of tourists from the United States, the most important international traveler market for the country according to data.
The US market is ‘sensitive’ to the warnings of no government travel, this in view of the insecurity of tourist sites in Quintana Roo and Baja California Sur, which are among the top five places in Mexico with the highest crime rate per 100,000 population.
Source: PVDN
