San Miguel de Allende will be launched as world-class meetings and wedding tourism destination.
As part of the destination’s interest, San Miguel de Allende will have a space for international meetings similar to that of Los Cabos.
With a view to the reactivation of business tourism, San Miguel de Allende will inaugurate its International Convention Center (CCI) next December, while also working to promote the recovery of romance tourism.
” It is the CCI like the one that exists in La Paz and Los Cabos, we will be opening it in December, ” said Salvador de Anda, director of Meetings Tourism of the Municipality’s Tourist Council.
Interviewed during the World Meetings Forum in Los Cabos, he pointed out that the venue of more than 3,200 square meters of surface will have capacity for 1,400 people; while they are currently planning the opening event, to which it is contemplated to invite organizers of meetings and congresses from Mexico to a corporate event.
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” We also want to use the convention center for the theme of romance, it is possible that events of this branch will also be brought,” he said.
He announced that they are already in talks to organize some national meetings that cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality.
The destination currently has more than 2,500 rooms in 165 hotels, in addition to accommodation projects from 5 international chains for the next two years: Hyatt (which began construction last April), Marriott, Hilton (scheduled for 2021) and One, which would increase capacity by 350 rooms.
San Miguel de Allende is one of the 11 heritage cities of the country and the second of the entity, along with the capital, Guanajuato. During 2019, the destination averaged an occupancy of 40.7%, 4.5 percentage points below that registered in 2017, while in the first 3 months of the year, the hotel occupancy in the destination remained below 35%.
At the same time, the destination has worked with its communication agency abroad to encourage the return of international tourists to the destination, mainly from the neighboring country to the north.
“In the United States our main markets are California and Texas , we are directing the main strategies to those states,” he stressed.
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To maintain the influx of romance tourism, San Miguel de Allende launched the format of pop-up weddings, whose first reservation is for the first week of October.
“They are small weddings of 15 people that can be organized a week in advance, they do not need much planning, and that is generating another economic spill compared to weddings of 300 people or more that we cannot carry out,” he said.
In 2019, 830 weddings were held in the destination, 70% of international tourists, while for this year, of the events scheduled before the pandemic, 300 weddings were canceled, while another 300 were postponed to 2021.
“We started the year very well with January, February and the middle of March, right now we don’t have weddings, they have just been reactivated on August 27, and we hope to have weddings closed by November. Right now, San Miguel de Allende has capacity for 100 people according to the authorities, counting the staff, we are talking about 80 attendees ”, said De Anda.
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In 2019, weddings of national tourists reached up to 800 people while those of foreigners ranged from 60 to 70 people. Therefore, to resume the celebration of these meetings, in September, the town will organize an exhibition with the destination wedding planners.
