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What terribly sad news that is for all the people who survive on the tourism industry in PV. No doubt Carnival will now discontinue visiting there. That one stupid robbery will hurt so many other Mexicans who really need those tourists to make a go of it. What a shame.

Totally agree -

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Sad as it is on all the major networks NOB. I suspect each cruise ship that stops in PV brings with it many thousands of dollars. Should several start to avoid PV the economy will suffer greatly.

At same time let's not forget the 22 who were robbed at gun point. How horrible and frightening is that.

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Mexico sets tourism record despite drug violence Feb 2012

Mexico attracted a record number of foreign visitors last year despite a frightening drug war that is prompting travel warnings for a number of areas around the country…..the most since the Bank of Mexico began keeping track in 1980. There was growth in each of the last five months of the year, officials said…..The number of air travellers from the United States to Mexico fell by 3 percent last year, but tourists from other countries - especially Brazil, Russia, Peru and China - registered sizable increases over 2010. Full article below. G

http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Mexico+sets+tourism+record+despite+drug+violence/6149810/story.html

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoRmC424jAw&feature=bf_prev&list=PLDAB9E4A8943C9971&lf=BFp

This is a link to a video documentary of the cruise ship Concordia disaster , the one that the captain abandoned while it was sinking. It's pretty amazing.

Those comments and the poll at the end of the OP's link are a sad testament to how Mexico is being percieved theese days.

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Betsy, these perceptions are from people NOB. If Mexico had record numbers of tourists in 2011, as stated in the LA Times, then the opinions of those commenting are not as pertinent as some would think. With many comments lacking any real criteria how could anyone base a decision on comments like: “Anyone going or staying in Mexico is a dimwit or has a death wish”, “Mexico and all of the hell hole that is all of South America”, “Why would anyone in their right mind ever vacation in Mexico??? Crazy gringos…” These comments are not representative of facts and mostly one-sided when most of the people who know otherwise don't take the time to comment.

G

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I keep hearing about this influx of tourists from Peru,Brazil, China and Russia. Where are they going to? Cancun? . Anyone has seen tours from these countries in their neck of the woods?

Unless you are standing outside of every tourist establishment (an impossibility I am sure you'd agree) with a clipboard and pen in hand taking a survey asking every tourist about their nationality, how do you know where they are from? Could you distinguish a Russian tourist from a Brazilian, a Canadian or American? Or a Mexican citizen from the Peruvian tourist? Ok, I'll let you have the Chinese.

G

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Unless you are standing outside of every tourist establishment (an impossibility I am sure you'd agree) with a clipboard and pen in hand taking a survey asking every tourist about their nationality, how do you know where they are from? Could you distinguish a Russian tourist from a Brazilian, a Canadian or American? Or a Mexican citizen from the Peruvian tourist? Ok, I'll let you have the Chinese.

G

This information is gleaned from the FMTs that tourists on airplanes, cars, and ships must fill out when they enter the country.

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Gus

I am not questioning the figures but I am wondering where the majority of these new tourists are going and yes I can tell if I hear any of he people mentioned above where they come from.

A very good friend of mine is Peruvian and I can hear the difference beween her way of speaking and a Mexican. I can tell Portuguese from Spanish or Russian. As far as Canadians and Americans it does not ake too long if you hear people speak,

I am European so we are used to hear many different languages and can pick up pretty quickly where a person is from. Actually i is a game we play, figuring out where people are from. We play it all the time so we have a lot of experience in that area.

I am hearing tourism is up and I have yet to go to a place where the locals say it is so I am assuming the beaches have to be it since we do not go to the beaches.

I was in Mexico City 3 weeks ago and the hotel where I usually stay was way off, there were very few foreign tourists most of he people there where Mexicans. I am going to Df again this week and will ask around because I am curious .

In the last 6 months we have visited quite a few ruins from Vera Cruz to Chiapas to Oaxaca and their numbers are off as well.

We had a big International convention in October in San Cristobal de las Casas where: the convention people spent no money. The Department of tourism picked up the tab for hotels and food. Everything was catered and the restaurants got no extra business.The indigenous vendors were asked to vacate the street while the convention was there and the theme of the convention was "Indigenous Mexico".. Hopefully all these agents will promote Chiapas eventually but so far no return.

The tours companies expect big things for the end of the year and say that places are booking up but who knows if this is true.

Of course I am not at every tourist joint there is but when you arrive in a place you pretty quickly get a feel if there are lots of tourists or not and so far in the last 6 months I have not gotten that feel that is why I am wondering if there is a large increase at the beaches.

Bu the way the office of tourism also claims Russians and others from that new tourist group spend way more money than the Ameriacans or Canadians so they have to be somewhere and the locals should be very happy wherever they are.

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Gus,

I'll question the numbers.... the number of flights to and from the US is off WAY more than 3%.... the number of cruise ship landings is way down too. Numbers like that are from the Mexican tourism dept and no more trustworthy than their crime numbers. Hotel bookings, time share usage etc in PV are all way down again this year and that's one of the bright spots in Mexican tourism. Mazatlan is considerable worse. We have quite a few contacts in that industry in PV and hear their wailing about it all the time.

Mexico is a wonderful country but not a great source of dependable statistics. The government is infamous for self serving data.

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It would be nice to hear from someone in Cancun to see if they are booming there. I know the coast in Oaxaca is not booming with these new tourists so that leaves Cancun or Baja. I know Air France was planning to increase their flights to Cancun so maybe that is the answer .

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Gus

A very good friend of mine is Peruvian and I can hear the difference beween her way of speaking and a Mexican. I can tell Portuguese from Spanish or Russian. As far as Canadians and Americans it does not ake too long if you hear people speak,

I am European so we are used to hear many different languages and can pick up pretty quickly where a person is from......

Of course I am not at every tourist joint there is but when you arrive in a place you pretty quickly get a feel if there are lots of tourists or not and so far in the last 6 months I have not gotten that feel......

Hands down you speak from more personal experience than myself. I have not been there in over 10 years, mainly in Mexico City and environs. I believe you are good at distinguishing accents but not 190 million people who, according to American and Mexican sources, visited Mexico in 2011. Then there are the cases like my wife and her family. They are Mexican but her mother emigrated from Spain and her father is American of Irish and German background, and she speaks Spanish with an American accent, and if she was just walking by and did not speak you would not think of her as being Mexican per se. Although I am sure you know that in Guadalajara there are many Mexicans with German ancestry.

I’ve been scouring the internet for tourist crimes from all over the world for the benefit of my family to prove to them that I am not crazy for wanting to move to Mexico and that crime is increasing everywhere. To be quite frank, for a place like Chapala, Ajijic etc… to be so close to a city of 6 million people you all had it really good for too long. I would have expected far more crime a while ago.

Why is it that Mexico is so mercilessly maligned yet other countries like Spain, England, Italy and New Zealand (who have had many incidents of crime and murder against tourists) never make the headlines? Just by the laws of averages, and assuming you were reporting fairly, you would see stories about tourist crimes in the rest of the world but this does not happen. Could Mexico be the only offender?

Did we hear about the 15 yr old American girl raped by 2 men on a Royal Caribbean cruise on 1-7-12? Did we hear of the 66 yr old American cruise ship tourist killed for his Rolex watch in Naples Italy on 5-28-11? How about the French tourist killed by someone in Argentina attempting to steal a camera on Feb 8, 2012? Don’t go to England. Did we hear about the Englishman from Kingsbury who held an Italian tourist captive for days raping and beating her in his London flat (Sept 2011)? How about the Belgian tourist killed at a rest stop in France in front of his young sons (July 2011)? In Feb 2012 an American was beaten in Romania by the police in an act of brutality, anyone see this in the evening news?

And while I feel bad for the woman beaten at a Mexican resort, I have to wonder why I have come across that story no less than 20 plus times (internet, tv and radio combined) yet I never heard about the Canadian in a wheelchair being severely beaten and robbed while vacationing in Australia. But turnabout being fair play, I also never heard anything about the April 2011 incident of a Chinese exchange student in Canada that was raped and killed in her dorm room while her boyfriend watched live from his webcam in China. How something so incredible and salacious escaped the American press is beyond me. These stories can be found online after digging through 10 or more pages worth of articles covering the same story about the same beating of the Canadian in Mexico.

I am not negating crime in Mexico but I am also not accentuating it to the exclusion of all the good Mexico has to offer the tourists of the world. And according to the article I sited, the world at large has been able, unlike NOB, to keep things in perspective. If taking a head count of rapes, robberies, muggings, murders etc…that happen to Mexican tourists, and if multiplied by an arbitrary factor of let’s say…10 to appease the Mexican crime stat skeptics, it would still be an abysmally low number when compared to the millions of tourists in which nary a hair on their heads (or any other part of their persons) were harmed.

As time goes on I am having less and less respect for a schizophrenic press that one day cries gloom and doom for Mexican tourism and then “banner year for Mexican tourism” the next.

G

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.... the number of flights to and from the US is off WAY more than 3%.... the number of cruise ship landings is way down too.

Hotel bookings, time share usage etc in PV are all way down again this year.......

Besides the crime increase in Mexico, is it not possible that some of this is also due to the terrible economy NOB? I know a fair amount of folks with adult children, well educated with marketable skills, losing their homes or having to take large loans from parents just to stay afloat. If you cannot pay student loans or find a job a "vakay" (vacation), as my youngest calls it, would be out of the question.

G

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I'm not sure of the reasons but I am damn sure that tourism is way off all over Mexico. I think it's likely that the US economy is a big part of that downturn but the cartel violence and publicity and robberies like this one and the ones that happened in Mazatlan that caused cruise ships to drop the port of call are important too. My point was the numbers of tourists that were released by the government are HIGHLY suspect when every other indicator around tells a different story.

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When I visit the U.S and I tell someone that I live in Mexico they are invariably horrified and blurt out "OH my God, aren't you scared?" or some variation of that. People think that we step over headless corpses to get to our cars and then drive down the streets with bullets pinging off our vehicles, they see "Mexico" as one huge, violent entity. Don't other Foreign residents deal with this sort of thing from the mal informed northern populatiion? Tourisim is suffering and that has to be one of the reasons.

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It would be nice to hear from someone in Cancun to see if they are booming there. I know the coast in Oaxaca is not booming with these new tourists so that leaves Cancun or Baja. I know Air France was planning to increase their flights to Cancun so maybe that is the answer.

I have a close friend who works in the tourism industry in Cancún. She and everyone else connected with that industry are in very bad straits indeed. Tourism has been very, very depressed there for more than a year.

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