Losing a big market
Mexico closed its national tourism board, so tourist hot spots are going diy.
THE Mexican government de-funded its national tourism board, forcing some hotel and resort towns south of the border to take matters into their own hands to avoid losing their biggest source of travellers – California.
The result has been the opening of two privately funded tourism offices in Los Angeles.
The hotels and restaurants in Los Cabos, a region in the southern peninsula of Baja California in Mexico, have pooled their funds to open the Los Cabos Tourism Board in LA so they can promote their destination to travel agents and others in Southern California.
“The opening of the LA office was a completely rational and strategic step that we needed to take,” said Rodrigo Esponda, managing director of the Los Cabos Tourism Board.
A few miles away in downtown LA, four former employees of the Mexico Tourism Board launched a private marketing agency, dubbed Studio Jungla, to promote Yucatan and Oaxaca, among other Mexican destinations.
“We have a good relationship with tour operators, with media and with meeting planners here,” said Jorge Gamboa, a former Mexico Tourism Board employee and now staffer at Studio Jungla. “This is a good opportunity to promote Mexico because Mexico is very unprotected.”
The opening of the privately funded offices reflects an effort by Mexican tourism officials to avoid any disruption to the flow of tourists – and dollars – streaming across the border.
For good reason. Mexico had expected to welcome 45 million international visitors who would spend Us$23.3bil (Rm96.37bil) while in the country in 2019. About 60% of those visitors were expected to come from the United States and 18% from California, according to a forecast by Mexican tourism industry experts before the tourism bureau was cut. The visitation numbers for this year were projected to be a 5.8% increase over the previous year.
While the projected growth is good news for Mexico’s tourism industry, it represents a slowdown from the last few years when the number of tourists visiting Mexico had grown by double digits annually.
Mexican tourism officials blame the slowdown on several factors, including a US State Department Travel Advisory issued in April about an increase in crime and kidnappings in several Mexican states, overall concerns about the global economy and the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which several airlines, including Aeromexico, had planned to use to serve the growing demand for air travel.
Travel industry experts warn that cutting tourism promotions and marketing can hurt the popularity of a travel destination for several years to come.
“The data shows over and over again that when a government cuts tourism promotion, their competitors reap an enormous economic benefit,” said Roger Dow, chief executive of the US Travel Association, the trade group for the nation’s travel industry. “Then, when they realise their mistake and re-implement their marketing, it can take years to recover their previous market share.”
For that reason, Dow said his trade group is pushing US Congress to reauthorise funding to promote the US to international travellers. The promotional programme, dubbed Brand USA, is paid for by fees charged to tourists and contributions from the private travel and tourism businesses.
“I’m never pleased to see a reduction in tourism promotion, whether here or abroad, for the simple fact that this industry creates economic benefits and good jobs for workers,” Dow added.
Mexico is the sixth most visited country in the world, according to the World Tourism Organization, so tourism industry leaders in Mexico said they were shocked to learn in December that the federal government was cutting its Us$295mil (Rm1.22bil) in annual funding to its national tourism promotion board.
“It’s really devastating for our country if there is no one here to keep the activation going for some of these activities,” said Alejandro Marin, one of the four leaders at Studio Jungla.
Instead, the government announced plans to divert the tourism funding to build a passenger train to serve tourists, travelling between Cancun and Palenque, a project that newly elected Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had promised to fund before taking office Dec 1.
In Mexico, the Visit Mexico website that was previously funded by the government is now financed by private donations from Google, Discovery Channel and hotel company Grupo Posadas. The Mexican government also created a panel of tourism entrepreneurs, including heads of airlines and hotel companies, to help fill the role vacated by the tourism panel.
Hotels and resorts of the Baja California region are directly contributing Us$2.5mil (Rm10.3mil) this year, plus Us$12mil (Rm49.8mil) from hotel taxes to fund the LA office of the Los Cabos Tourism Board.
Now that Mexico’s national tourism panel is out of commission, Esponda worries that other destinations, including Hawaii and the Bahamas, will lure Californians away from returning to their favourite vacation spots in Los Cabos.
“We don’t want to wait,” he said. “What we want is to keep a constant presence in the market.” – Los Angeles Times/tribune News Service