Rodolfo Elizondo
The Head of the Tourism Secretariat in Mexico, Rodolfo Elizondo and the Quintana Roo State Governor, Félix González Canto, announced this Friday May 15th that the United States Center for Disease Control lifted its restriction for traveling to Mexico.
Both personalities informed the measure before local entrepreneurs and celebrated it as the first step in lifting the travel alert issued by the United States due to the Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico.
Elizondo Torres, who held a similar reunion with entrepreneurs from the tourism sector in the Riviera Maya, indicated that the lifting of such restriction will suppose the possibility of accelerating the second phase of the promotional campaign targeting mainly tourists from the US and Canada.
On this, the General Director of the Chamber of Tourist Promotion of México (Consejo de Promoción Turística de Mexico – CPTM), Oscar Fitch, pointed out that the first of this campaign will start next Wednesday and it will concentrate in national tourism with a call to ‘Mexicanity’ and solidarity of the federal entities to support touristic centers from the country.
The total investment in the campaign which includes both phases will cost 1,200 million Mexican pesos (around 90 million US dollars) and it will support itself on the México brand, even though it will also get a hand from the differentiated promotion that each touristic destination makes, Fitch detailed.
Along with the lifting of the restriction to ‘travel to Mexico only if necessary’ from the US, Belgium, The United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador, also announced the lifting of restrictions for traveling to Mexico. This was underlined by the Quintana Roo Governor.
Even though such announcements stir confidence in local and federal authorities for repositioning Mexico’s image to the world, Elizondo Torres stressed that until the US doesn’t take away the travel alert completely against Mexico and the World Health Organization eliminates its sanitary alert for human flu, private, independent, municipal or state campaigns who are not aligned to the strategies lead by the Federal Government will not be supported.
Nevertheless, he made it clear that investors running their own repositioning campaigns are in absolute freedom to do so.
In the same sense, the State Secretary of Tourism, Sara Latife Ruiz Chávez, who informed that starting next week the ‘outlet’ style direct promotion will take place in the cities of México, Gudalajara and Monterrey, with promotions, extra offers and support of the groups, meetings and conventions market.
Thereby, she outstand that flight cancellations and hotel bookings ‘have touched base’ and therefore, it foresees a light increase in touristic activity in the Mexican Caribbean who’s tourists destiniations are ready to ‘consume the market’. On this, Elizondo Torres compared the human flu and its consequences with what he called ‘a hurricane of perception and image’. Since he perceived, from this last visit, ‘a destination fully prepared to rise in the matter of economic tourism’.
Tourism traffic into Mexico is closely related to the housing market. As more tourism is expected this summer in Baja California and Rosarito so in an increase in Baja real estate sales.
