Visa flexibility to boost tourism

Thursday, 07 November 2013 00:10
THE NEWS


Tourism Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu said on Wednesday that governments need to make visa regulations more flexible to increase the flow of tourists into Mexico.

Ruiz Massieu’s comments were made at the World Tourism Organization Minister’s Summit, scheduled during the World Travel Market in London, which brought together officials from 157 other countries.

Tourism and aviation policies need to be designed together in an innovative manner, she went on to say, so that they can tackle problems like identifying potential markets, reviewing airport infrastructure, generating promotional strategies and multilateral agreements and identifying potential tourist destinations.

Coordinating these policies among nine government agencies is the goal of Mexico’s Tourism Cabinet, which was formed under President Enrique Peña Nieto, Ruiz Massieu said, adding that there had never been such an ambitious mechanism for directing tourism policy in the country’s history.

All participants at the World Tourism Organization Minister’s Summit agreed that the growth of air travel is intrinsically linked to the expansion of the tourism industry, and that it’s therefore urgent to collectively plan both economic sectors as a national and international strategy.

In 2012, a billion international tourists traveled around the world, spending more than $1.3 trillion. More than half of these tourists arrived at their destination by air. An even greater proportion of tourists who travel to far-off destinations, particularly islands, landlocked countries and developing countries flew.

The extraordinary growth of the tourism industry in recent decades — there were only 25 million international tourists in 1950, compared with the billion seen last year — is due principally to advances in air travel, as well as the increase in the size of the global middle class, as more people have the disposable income needed to travel.

Ruiz Massieu said that, despite the close relationship between air travel and tourism, governments tend to draft policy for these sectors separately, which often leads to a lack of communication and even sometimes contradictory policies. In many countries, this can limit the development of the potential of their tourism and air travel industries, which prevents them from turning tourism into an important motor of development, as she hopes will occur in Mexico.