At the opening of the new edition of “Tianguis Turístico” in Acapulco, the president of the association of hotel chains and director of City Express, Luis Barrios, asked the president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to allocate $ 125 million dollars annually for tourism promotion of the country, equivalent to half a percentage point of what tourism enters Mexico for foreign exchange, and thus be able to sustain the competition. This is an issue that the government has not yet made clear, and that causes uncertainty in the sector.
The director of City Express also said that the industry needs seed capital to promote and publicize the different destinations of our country internationally.
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Another issue mentioned by Barrios was the regulation of digital hosting applications such as Airbnb, which he called unfair competition, “the collection of taxes on this model would serve to obtain some of the necessary resources for tourism advertising,” he said bluntly.
At the request of Barrios and the support of the leader of Concanaco-Servytur, Jose Manuel Lopez Campos, who made available to the administration four million economic units to carry out the tasks of tourism promotion in accordance with the agreement that was made between the Sectur and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in recent days, the President of the Republic, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, only limited himself to follow his speech, and talk about his strategy to promote tourism nationally and internationally, which is aimed at the urban development of cities around tourist destinations such as Los Cabos, Nayarit, Playa del Carmen and Acapulco. The objective is to lessen the contrast between highly developed hotel areas and marginalized areas.
For his part, Miguel Torruco Marques said that for this year 43.3 million international tourists will arrive in the country, which will mean an increase of 4.7 percent more than that recorded in 2018, and a flow of 23,600 billion dollars, which would represent double-digit growth with 10.6 percent higher than last year.
Only in January of this year, he added, foreign exchange income from international travelers grew to $2,289 billion dollars, 17.7 percent more than in the same period last year.
Torruco Marqués also referred to the diversification of the issuing markets, which will focus on those countries whose travelers have presented a higher per capita expenditure, through the programs “Operation knocks doors” and “Reunion with my roots. In addition, they will have the support of the Mexican embassies and consulates, as part of the Collaboration Agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote tourism.
“Soon, in our platform Visit-Mexico we will announce the strategies in the use of new technological tools that allow the national and international promotion of destinations to multiply,” added the head of Sectur.
Finally, the governor of Guerrero, Hector Astudillo, asked entrepreneurs not to neglect tourism, “the friendly face of the country,” and join forces with the federal government to build the Convention Center of Acapulco, home for 36 years of Tianguis Tourism.
The Yucatan Times
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