La Evolución del Turismo Social en Zihuatanejo

Thank you, Rob. I appreciate the history and the analysis of changing trends in the tourist market. I appreciate your thoughtful post

It wouldn’t seem that you could or would want to regulate who comes to the area. But it would seem that you could regulate the carriers that deliver guests.

It seems a no-brainer that people should not be spending the night in busses. It’s not healthy. It’s not clean. Period. It doesn’t seem overly restrictive to say that busses should be garaged or parked in designated areas that are away from town center and beaches. And guests need overnight lodging that isn’t in a bus.

Just my thought. I’d start with the busses.

The tour operators don't want to change a thing because it affects their bottom line. Any suggestions that they find undesirable is met with the response "we'll just take our business elsewhere", to which I am certainly willing to call their bluff, but finding a politician or any public servant with anything resembling a backbone (especially when it jeopardizes kickbacks) is a quixotic quest.

I believe all of us here want even the poorest people to feel welcome here. I don't think any Mexican would want to deny them the pleasure of spending vacation time here even if it's only for a few hours or a day, but we can't allow anything to jeopardize the tourism our community of around 100,000 needs to sustain itself. We recently had to absorb the entire population of Vallecitos de Zaragoza, a community of about 2,000 families in the sierra of Zihuatanejo who have been forced to flee their homes due to the total neglect by all branches of government in the face of the insecurity that is affecting most of the interior regions of Guerrero much more severely than anything we see here in Zihuatanejo. All those folks are out of work now. And we cannot sustain our community on the pittance derived from our social tourism. We also can't allow or social tourism to displace or replace our tourism with the purchasing power our community needs to sustain itself. It's a no-brainer for me, but then a lot of folks with personal stakes in the bus tourism make more noise than I or other reasonable citizens are making. Even when promises and assurances are made by public servants, political expediency usually assures they are quickly forgotten. Even when taxpayers organize to present a more united front, so much of the local administration's budget comes from the federal government that apparently we're still fairly easy to ignore.