The Honourable Gloria Guevara, Minister of Tourism
With the Mayan countdown calendar ticking away the hours, Mexico is ramping up its quest for more international visitors. The tourism juggernaut currently sits at #10 on the list of countries ranked by tourist arrivals and has set itself the goal of being in the Top 5, welcoming 50 million visitors – by 2018. Achieving that goal will mean more than doubling their current 22.4 million annual international visitors.
With that goal in mind, Mexico Tourism’s heavy hitters visited Toronto last week to launch their really big exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Maya: Secrets of their Ancient World and showcase their delectable Yucatan cuisine.
On hand to inspire some of their top Canadian industry partners were The Honourable Gloria Guevara, Minister of Tourism; Ambassador to Canada his Excellency Francisco Bario; the MTB’s COO Rodolfo López Negrete Coppel; Mario López Valdéz, the governor of Sinaloa, and thrown in at the deep end and coming up with a big splash, our own new Director for Mexico Tourism in Toronto, Rodrigo Esponda.
While the officials updated us with their latest results and ongoing campaigns, we were feted with a delicious assortment of Yucatan specialities created by Frida Restaurant’s executive chef, José Hadad.
If you want to be in the big leagues, you’ve got to play the part and Mexico is spending the big bucks to catapult themselves up the tourism scoring leaders’ chart. They are spending $2 million on consumer advertising campaigns in Canada geared primarily at hearing direct from Canadians about why they love Mexico. Their taxi campaign captures feedback from Canadians who have just returned from their vacation on a hidden camera in their taxi home from the airport.
They are also heavily supporting their travel supplier partners to promote Mexico... their top 7 partners (SellOffVacations; Air Canada Vacations; Transat Holidays; WestJet Vacations; Thomas Cook Canada; Itravel2000 & Sunwing) will receive $1.1 million to do just that.
Mexico has also determined that pushing Adventure Travel is a good business move – because those travellers spend 4 times more than the traditional sun seekers do. In pursuing their position in that category Mexico hosted the Adventure Travel World Summit this past October.
Mexico has big plans for the future well beyond 21 December 2012, because as Rodolfo López Negrete Coppel stated, “We know how to read the Mayan calendar and it’s not going to be the end of the world... it’s going to be a new and wondrous beginning.”
