The US widened its travel warnings at the same time Mexico is mounting new efforts to lure visitors.
The Mexican Tourism Board is spending millions on ads to promote tourism. This is the “year of tourism,” proclaims Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
The US’s warnings have had some impact.
Nearly half of all available rooms in 70 major resort centers in Mexico have been vacant this year, except for the Easter crowd that nearly filled the hotels for a few days over the holiday weekend, according to the tourism board.
Just before Easter, the US State Department added four Mexican states to its list of areas to avoid. It now urges US travelers — the bulk of Mexico's tourist economy — to steer clear of all or parts of 10 Mexican states, including most of the border region and popular vacation sites such as Acapulco.
"What's disconcerting is that these advisories are painting an entire country with a broad brush," Terry Denton, president of a Texas, branch of the Travel Leaders agency, told the LA Times. "It just reinforces the unfortunate impression that all of Mexico is not a safe destination."
Some US travel agents and Mexican officials believe news about the violence has been overblown.
In Acapulco, the occupancy rate at major resorts slid 7 percentage points to 38.4 percent last year from 2008. In that period, Cancun's rate tumbled to 57.4 percent from 72.1 percent, according to the Mexico Tourism Board. Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta and Riviera Maya have seen similar declines.
Last year, about three-quarters of the 9.9 million visitors arriving on airlines came from the United States or Canada.
Tourism traditionally has provided Mexico its third largest source of revenue.
As drug-related lawlessness escalated last year, 111 Americans were killed in Mexico, compared with just 35 in 2007, authorities said. Others have been kidnapped from hotels, carjacked at gunpoint and targeted for extortion.
The State Department has urged travelers to avoid the states of Tamaulipas and Michoacan and parts of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Jalisco.
But most areas, Mexico tourism officials said, are safe.
"This episode of violence has been concentrated in very specific pockets of the country," said Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete, chief operating officer of the Mexico Tourism Board. "You're not going to stop going to New York because there's an incident in Dallas."
By David Wilkening
