Faced with a sargassum problem and a resulting visitor downturn, Cancun this year was a destination in need of a good-news infusion. The 32nd Cancun Travel Mart held last week certainly obliged, playing up the positivity ahead of next year, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the development of Cancun Island as a resort destination.
Arguably the most important news shared with the 230 buyers and 240 delegates representing 15 countries who gathered at Cancun's convention center: As far as the region's resorts and hotels are concerned, the sargassum problem is old news.
I can attest that there wasn't any sign of seaweed at our host property, the recently renovated Le Blanc Spa Resort, nor at the nearby Flamingo Cancun Resort, where our group of travel trade reporters spoke with Roberto Cintron, president of Cancun's hotel association, after the mart.
Cintron said that with sargassum now largely absent from the region's shores (and from the media's headlines), hotel numbers have shown signs of recovery.
"We were very scared in September; we haven't had occupancies this low for many years," Cintron said, as domestic travelers and other beach vacationers opted instead to head west to Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan. "I'm talking low, 60%. Now we're back on 70% this month, and November, it's getting there. Actually it's way better than many thought."
That's undoubtedly a relief and reassurance to hotel developers, who will have opened a total of 6,000 new rooms in the region by year's end. A total of 17,000 are in the pipeline, according to Cintron, mostly in the northern part of the island. Presumably that pipeline includes Grand Island Cancun, a 3,000-room project that Mexico's tourism secretary, Miguel Torruco Marques, described as "one of the largest investments of the last 30 years in the region."
In July, Mexico's Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources approved construction of the project, which is eyed for a 2022 opening -- though Torruco made no mention of it during his Cancun Travel Mart appearance on Oct. 15, instead making an announcement about the project the following day during a press conference with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The project appears to have been in the works for at least seven years, though it was unclear whether its scope has changed appreciably in the ensuing years.
For the region's tourism industry, then, the challenge remains how to share all this good news.
Dario Flota, tourism director for the state of Quintana Roo, spoke with media about dealing with the "pressure of bad news, some of it false news, about what is going on in Mexico in terms of the sargassum, in terms of the security. We have been working closely with the media and with the agents providing a lot of information.
"We started asking the industry to share with us their good news: openings, awards, new chefs, festivals. So we fortunately have an industry where ... they're very collaborative with us."
With this year's dissolution of the Mexico Tourism Board, the country's regional promotional entities continue to seek out opportunities to collaborate. This year's mart, for instance, saw the attendance of five state tourism secretaries -- Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Queretaro, Yucatan and Tamaulipas -- as the event moved beyond its traditional Quintana Roo focus.
"The lack of a national tourist board has moved and forced destinations to look for alliances ... to do the marketing for their destinations," Flota said.
"We are missing the Mexico Tourism Board in many ways -- for the international campaigns, for the international representation, for the link with each country to identify who are the players, who are the airlines, who are the media," Flota said.
Still, Quintana Roo Governor Carlos Joaquin has committed "to continue attending every trade show relevant for the industry," Flota added, such as next month's World Travel Market and next spring's ITB Berlin. For the Cancun region's tourism industry, that's good news indeed.