Monday, January 4, 2010

Mexico rebounds with discounts

Hammered by the Great Tourism Crash of '09, Mexico says now that, "It's Time to Go." While it's still too early to tell whether visitors will come in their usual numbers during the country's peak winter season, there are signs of a recovery.

Mexico depends greatly on tourism -- an estimated 22.6 million foreign tourists visited Mexico in 2008 and spent about $13 billion, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. What Time Magazine headlined this summer as "The Curse on Mexican Tourism: Guns, Germs and Recession" kept visitors away by the millions for months.

During the spring peak of Mexico's problems -- the blazing battles among drug cartels in a few cities, the devastating outbreak of swine flu that brought commerce to a near halt, and the effects of the lingering global recession, particularly in the United States -- tourism numbers fell by about 50 percent. Last spring as an example, always-popular Cancun experienced hotel occupancy levels of 21.3 percent, Puerto Vallarta recorded a low of 29.2 percent and Acapulco's hotel occupancy nose-dived to 16.7 percent. Thousands of service employees were laid off as a result.

Posted via web from Cancun Mexico News

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