Domestic tourism props up Cancún in wake of Wilma

As Cancún continues to rebuild and reinvent itself, a new study sheds some interesting light on how the hurricane’s impact has been felt in the resort.

Overall, the number of tourists staying in Cancún has fallen by 10 per cent since the October storm. But it could have been so much worse.

An article [Spanish] in today’s La Jornada reports that researchers at La Salle University’s Institute of Tourism Research [website not available until April 3rd] in Cancún have identified that Mexicans themselves flooded in to nullify the slump in US visitors, whose numbers peeled back to a third of what they were before Wilma struck.

In the twelve months to January this year, domestic tourism to the state of Quintana Roo jumped from 18 per cent of total visitors to fully 65 per cent.

I’ve not yet seen the research so cannot be sure, but I would imagine that there were some pretty attractive travel deals on offer to Mexicans in the last quarter of 2005.

Contacts on the ground attest to having noticed a lot more domestic tourists than in previous years.

La Salle also observed the passage of Wilma last October had merely accelerated a recent downward trend in visitors to Cancún.

Cancún’s loss was to a great extent to the benefit of the Riviera Maya. In July-August 2005, 30.8 per cent of visitors to Quintana Roo headed off to the Riviera Maya, while in the first two months of 2006, this figure had risen to 43.2 per cent.

Photo: Playa del Carmen, March 27th; ©Chantelle Tucker

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