“In Cancun´s airport, in the first quarter of the year there were 10 percent less plane seats arriving at the terminal, while destinations such as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica have grown 15 percent. Clearly, what stopped arriving in the Mexican Caribbean goes to those destinations,” said Gonzalo del Peón, president of AMResorts.
This decline, he expalins, hit the company’s hotels in that region with a drop in revenue of 10 percent on average in the first quarter of the year, as well as a reduction in occupancy of between three and four percentage points. As a result, rates have also fallen 10 percent, to try to fill more rooms and guarantee the income of investors who participated in the development of the establishment.
“The investments were made considering a certain level of income, but when the expectation is not met, the hotels begin to lose, and if investors see that they can earn more in another destination they will leave,” he concluded. AMResorts is seeing with “great concern” the situation of uncertainty in Mexico, after the extinction of the promotion, the decline of U.S. tourists, the negative campaigns promoted from Washington and the presence of sargazo in the Caribbean.
(Photo: El Pais)
“The perfect storm is when you have the issue of insecurity and that are amplified when American customers perceive the country as a place of great risk and decide to go elsewhere. If we add to this that the government decides to cancel all promotional funds becomes more complicated, because there is no leader in crisis management,” said the executive in an interview with El Sol de Mexico.
The CEO of Apple Leisure Group (ALG), Alex Zozaya, told REPORTUR.mx in Seville during the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) summit that his chain AMResorts, which is the fourth largest in the Caribbean along with Meliá and Riu, has decided to stop investments because of the situation in Mexico of declining tourism.
“In Mexico we have 36 hotels, half of our portfolio, and 9 under construction but some projects have been paused, and those who were going to start are not going to start because now the situation is a little uncertain, although those who had already started are going to continue,” said after his participation in a panel of this summit. “We are with the project of continuing to open new hotels in Mexico but also in the country we are seeing the possibility of converting existing hotels that are already open to take them to our brands and our business model,” he told REPORTUR.mx
Zozaya explained that arrivals of U.S. travelers are growing 20.5% in Jamaica, 16% in Dominican Republic, 26% in Costa Rica, while there is a 4% drop in the arrival of travelers to destinations in Mexico of the group he heads.
The Yucatan Times with information from reportur.mx
