Thanks to my friends at PlanetEye for the tools and the Mexico Tourism Board for the images, I was able to organize a collection of images depicting interesting regions that may not be as popular as the beaches. Again, just to make the point that tourism promotion is usually biased to send people on charters to the beaches, but there is far more depth to this and any country. At a time when everyone in the industry is wondering how to restore the glorious days, this is only one idea that deserves attention.
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For best results, use the zoom controls (+/-) to get closer on the map and click on the markers to preview the images within that area. This is a very cool widget that will continue to be updated as I keep adding photos to the collection.
If you’ve been to Cancun, Vallarta, Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Acapulco, Mazatlan or Huatulco chances are you don’t know Mexico. Yes, you’ve enjoyed the privileged beaches, the top-notch hotels, a first-class experience and you fell in love with these places and the people that live in them. But you are probably missing the best part. As Manuel was saying a few days ago: “I dare you to find Holbox”. In reinventing tourism in mexico, I implied that all these beach destinations are going to have a really difficult time getting back on track:
Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them [...]
In The Art of Travel, De Botton suggested there are no more places left to discover. With the overwhelming amount of information available on each and every major destination around the world it is likely that I could discover the major landmarks just as well from my computer than walking through them. Of course travellers will argue that first-hand experience is what matters, even if millions of people have had the same opportunity. While exploring the best reasons to travel I had emphasized the quest for the “experience”:
The tourist that never leaves the beaten path is likely only exposed to an esterile experience that has been washed out of all its original power.
One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique.
The age of discovery is over. Every corner of our planet has been documented ad nauseam… [...]
Courtesy of Hector Garcia @ Flickr
To support my last post about reinventing tourism in Mexico here is a shot of a small church in the south of the city. La Conchita is located in the Coyoacan area, but it is a few blocks away from the popular square, but it is a most sought-after location for weddings. This has me thinking about micro-tourism. More on that later.
Travelling to Mexico in the wake of one of the worst tourism declines in recent memory, has been an eery experience: the occasional masked traveller, the non-existent line ups to check-in and a 319 with perhaps 20 passengers. But it isn’t the feeling of crossing some imaginary boundary to a forbidden land or the fear of catching some untamed virus awaiting at the arrival lounge. What makes this trip so uneasy is the realization that the millions of people that are not flying today may not be coming back to Mexico for a really long time.
Whether failures in policy-making, mass-hysteria, international press or just some random genetic mutation are to blame for the stampede the fact is that loosing its tourism edge, Mexico is posed for very dark times ahead. Suffice to know that its tourism industry is second only to oil.
In the midst of such a downturn the entire sector will have to rethink how it positions itself to re-engage with travellers. Yes, Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience [...]
Using the Emerging Markets Index released by Mastercard back in October, I’ve created something I’m going to call the Emerging Destination Index as a tool to provide clues as to which non-traditional tourist destinations may provide the fundamental infrastructure to sustain the type of travellers that I’ve been discussing over the last little while in this blog.
The original index data is available from Mastercard, and all I did was to reconfigure the weights assigned by the original methodology to assign more value to those dimensions that have a higher impact on the ability of a traveller to operate remotely from the region with fair access to a urban standard of living. These are the weights I assigned:
Economic and Commercial Environment (0%) – Used in the original index to measure time and costs for building a standard warehouse, registering a property, exporting/importing cargo, and rate corruption and foreign bond, it seemed mostly irrelevant for the purpose of this index, so I left it out.
Economic Growth and Development (10%) – Measuring the broad economic health and growth of the national economy this dimension seems to be the best way of describing the level of infrastructure that will [...]
As we struggle to find ways to survive the current crisis and look at the leaders of the world to provide guidance, the latest Hub Culture 2009 Zeitgeist Ranking will come in handy as a tour of the cities that are better positioned to sustain an acceptable quality of life while providing plenty of opportunities to rebuild for the future. A zeitgeist reflecting the drama of our times:
Washington,DC
its not really about the Obamas – its about the context of our changing expectations of government
Berlin
Berliners become an enigma – povo at home, increasingly affluent abroad
Beijing
Just ignore the noxious skyline as you watch the GDP growth rates, still hovering near 9%
Los Angeles
LA’s fashion scene has stagnated, and the city’s hold on entertainment is slipping to diffusion by web 2.0
Tokyo
the principles of kaizen (continuous improvement) are shaping a really cool new Japanese ecovibe
Sydney
The general attitude down under appears to be one of distant concern
Saö Paulo
Here, ‘crunch’ is in the quinoa, not in the financial vocabulary
Hong Kong
The city is rich enough to sit out the bust, and it can always rely on China’s neighboring Guangdong province to drive the local economy
New York
Hunger breeds innovation, because people actually have to think, plot and [...]
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