La PaZIHencia Costeña

Came to Zihua at the end of October and Cabo for Thanksgiving. What a difference, Cabo had plenty of gringos and while in Ixtapa for a week we only saw 1 other group of gringos and that was on Isla Ixtapa. We ate dinner most every night in Zihua and all the places were really dead. Not the case in Cabo, the marina area was very busy. Zihua just doesn’t attract new tourists anymore from the States. Most all the gringos that travel here are older and believe that traveling is too risky for them. Coming from California there are so many flights going to Cabo and so few going to Zihua. We discovered this place almost 20 years ago when we used to cruise, maybe with the new pier the ships might come back and some younger people will discover Zihua. Zihua already had declining tourism before Covid now it has basically only National tourists which from what I saw at the Azul Grand do little for the local economy.

Excellent observations!

Can anyone even recall seeing an ad on TV or in ANY media for Zihuatanejo? Not Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo. There are none. And the few that show up on YouTube are pretty bad from my point of view. Either they use terrible music that has NOTHING to do with Zihuatanejo or they promote swimming with dolphins or they are so superficial they might as well be advertising Disney World. No one receiving an inflated salary for promoting our destination seems to understand what Zihuatanejo is all about or care, they just want to fill Ixtapa's hotels which seems to keep the politicians content, and the budgets keep flowing, and more concrete gets poured and more lodgings get built that we can't ever fill. We aren't in competition with Cancún or Los Cabos or Acapulco. We are in our own category. Bars shouldn't be our main attraction as someone else commenting here said was important to them. Certainly not enough to warrant canceling a vacation. Christ, buy a six-pack or a bottle and make friends at the beach if you need drinking buddies so much. For the formative years that led to Zihuatanejo's "discovery" before there ever was Ixtapa, people came here and met each other. They enjoyed the natural beauty. They went fishing, diving, walking. They explored the coastal communities. They enjoyed the peace and quiet that was a welcome change from the noisy cities they came from. There was no TV, almost no telephone service, and that was JUST FINE. No one worried about talking to anyone back home daily, they sent them a post card instead which often arrived long after they had already returned. That was when you could walk down the street and not be able to easily distinguish millionaires or famous people from anyone else, and THAT was part of the attraction. Now we can't even have Tik-Toc "stars" from China without a crowd showing up just to get a glimpse. WTF?

Tourism is fickle and should never be the only source of income for any economy. Even Florida finally learned that lesson back when I still lived there. And they certainly know that lesson throughout the Caribbean islands, too. We should never change our community to conform to a sector of tourism. Quite the contrary. The community is what should be preserved and built upon. But we still need to get the word out. Cruise ships are one way for people to discover us and see that we are quite different and distinct from other destinations they visit along our coast. But there must also be publicity campaigns and reliable sources of information that accurately reflect and promote our destination so that we don't end up with folks looking for Acapulco-style entertainment or a Miami Beach lifestyle or even a Daytona Beach atmosphere. I certainly hope we never end up like those places, but so many people have moved here from other places that they have no reference to orient them. They have quite different ideas of tourism, and buses full of people albeit with no real purchasing power look just fine to them. Obviously a city of over 100,000 people cannot live from the bus tourism, and the big All-Included hotels in Ixtapa can only lower their rates so much, and the time-share sharks can only snag so many people. The more we build the less attractive we become and the more we continue to chase away the people who made Zihuatanejo prosperous. All those luxury homes that get built sit mostly empty much of the year. That isn't the solution. Zihuatanejo was most prosperous when the area's main hotels were the Calpulli, the Catalina and the Villa del Sol. The people with money to spend who visited then often rented simple homes, not luxury homes, because THAT was what they enjoyed. But Zihuatanejo hasn't had leaders or people in charge of the tourist industry who know what they're doing for well over 20 years, and it shows. Too much of an every-man-for-himself greedy atmosphere.