Holiday weekend

During the first vacation we spent at out new place on La Madera, I started counting foreign boats in the bay. There were so many, that I quit counting after a while. Last January there were only 12 on the day I counted. But I've seen more and more buses parked around the base of the hill. You'd think that someone in the local administration would look into finding an outfit in the advertising industry to do some targeted marketing to revive the foreign visitor numbers.

But they have the Dirección de Turismo de Zihuatanejo, the Oficina de Convenciones y Visitantes (OCV), Secretaría de Turismo de Guerrero, Promotora Turística de Guerrero PROTUR), and the Secretaría de Turismo de México (SECTUR). With all those millions of tax pesos budgeted for the sole purpose of promoting Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa you'd think somebody somewhere outside of Mexico would've seen an ad or a commercial for Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa. But so far nada, zip, zilch. But the public functionaries all have nice homes, drive nice cars, send their kids to nice private schools, take several nice vacations a year and generally live like royalty in comparison with the great majority of Mexicans.

Why should we need someone in the advertising industry to do their job for them?

With the Mexican tradition of overloading rooms, our friends had 8 in a room, the numbers could have been higher.
Either way it is just a estimate.
Also many visitors stay with family in the area and don't spend.

They don't count rentals. Just the major hotels. Otherwise the expenditures ratio falls through the floor. They have been doing this for years to justify their jobs, and all the locals in the business just shake our heads at the simulation. Locals have tried to get them to modernize their methods, but this is Guerrero and accuracy in reporting is near the bottom of importance as far as public functionaries are concerned.

What they don't want to report, or rather confirm, is what we already know. Although more warm bodies are coming to visit Zihuatanejo, mostly via tour buses, the amount spent has fallen drastically and remains well below what is needed to simply sustain the number of hotels and tourist-oriented services. We have around a hundred thousand people trying to sustain themselves with less money from the tourism industry year after year while tourism officials try to justify their jobs. We need to correct this by diversifying our economy so we aren't 100% dependent on tourism as well as by attracting tourists with more purchasing power. Neither of these urgent needs is receiving any attention at all from any governmental office that I'm aware of.

During the first vacation we spent at out new place on La Madera, I started counting foreign boats in the bay. There were so many, that I quit counting after a while. Last January there were only 12 on the day I counted. But I've seen more and more buses parked around the base of the hill. You'd think that someone in the local administration would look into finding an outfit in the advertising industry to do some targeted marketing to revive the foreign visitor numbers.

One day in early 2007, the first winter we stayed on the water at La Madera, we counted 140 sail or power boats anchored in the bay. There's been nothing like that since. I suppose the economic meltdown of 2008 - and Mexico's version of "The Troubles" was and still is largely responsible.