MEXICO CITY (AP) – The hotel on Mexico’s Pacific coast, the city of Acapulco, is putting its hopes on returning tourists as the number of coronavirus cases decreases and the violence that has propelled travelers slowly diminished.
The governor of Guerrero state said Friday that hotels could now accept visitors to 40% of their capacity, compared to 30% in the past under pandemic restrictions. Governor Héctor Astudillo boasted that Acapulco reduced the number of COVID-19 deaths to an average of 9.6 consistent with the day and mitigated overcrowding in city hospitals before the pandemic.
The city, once ranked as Mexico’s fifth deadliest, fell to 44th place. Homicides decreased by about 20% in the first part of 2020 until the same time in 2019.
On Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited this once glamorous resort and pledged to resolve the pollutants affecting the resort’s outstanding bay.
“We’re going to cover up Acapulco, we’re going to cover the bay so there’s no more pollution. That’s my commitment,” he said. In June, heavy rains overflowed typhoon sewers, sending sewage and debris to the bay.
Contrary to top experts, Obrador predicted the end of the pandemic.
“What I feel, my expectation, is that soon, very soon, we will be back to normal,” the president said. “Economic activity is coming back, tourism is returning to Acapulco, but I hope that in a month, two months, we will have very favorable conditions.”
Even if those forecasts come true, the way back will remain a long way for Mexico’s troubled tourism industry. In the first quarter, tourism revenues fell by 51.5% and the quarter’s figures will be worse.
With approximately 800,000 hotel rooms, Mexico has the seventh largest hotel infrastructure in the world. In 2018, tourism accounted for 8.7% of Mexico’s GDP and created about 2.3 million jobs.
Many of these jobs evaporated the pandemic. Even on the most productive scenario, if travel alerts were lifted (Mexico has lately the highest “no-travel” alert from the U.S. State Department), Mexican hotels would end the year with only 47% occupancy on average.
Mexico has undergone some clumsy efforts to publicize tourism.
In early August, the country’s VisitMexico.com site suffered a plague of poor systematic translations of the names of the posts, with the state of Nuevo León with “New Lion” and the famous Caribbean beach hotel of Tulum with all kinds of “Jumpsuit”. Since then, the online page has been repositioned through an online symbol that promises that a new site will be online on August 20.
A few days earlier, officials got rid of a couple of Acapulco video-rated ads promoting the reputation of the fuzzy season as a nightclub, despite the fact that nightclubs are lately closed to reinforce social estrangement. They claimed that the advertisements were not suitable for the coronavirus pandemic.
“We stopped being a postcard from the past, today we replace the rules,” says one narrator in one of the videos. “Actually, there are no rules,” the voice says, because you can see other people having weird meals and going out to nightclubs. “Eat what you want, have fun day and night and until the early hours of the morning … look for new friends and new loves.”
Acapulco was once a glamorous getaway that attracted the foreign jet-set. It was during his vacation in the sixties that the novelist Gabriel García Márquez came up with the concept of “100 years of solitude”. In 1975, Bill Clinton arrived here with a young woman named Hillary for her honeymoon in Acapulco.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, the station’s infrastructure collapsed and poor, overcrowded settlements emerged inland, leading to the development of unemployment, crime and pollution unrest. Since 2006, the violence of drug gangs has made Acapulco one of the most violent cities in Mexico.
A laborer pressed for the government to continue to fight crime and violence.
“There would possibly be or not a pandemic, and you can have very nice beaches, but if there’s no security, you can’t move on,” obrador said.