Congress tourism in Yucatan is not at the attendance levels it had before the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledged the vice president of the Association of Tourism Promotion Agencies (Aaprotuy), Gonzalo Novelo Luján.
In his opinion, this tourism segment is recovering very slowly and, before talking about any increase in this matter, we must first fight to push it and position it again at the standards it had in 2019.
“I don’t have a percentage of how much meeting tourism decreased in Yucatán. It had a high recovery after the pandemic, it was a peak of events in 2022, but it went down again in 2023 and we are struggling to push it back,” he admitted.
In Yucatan, he explained, conference and convention tourism is important because it is reactivated when vacations are down.
“We know that we have not reached the level standards before the pandemic,” he reiterated. “We had atypical behavior. When the convention centers were closed for two years due to the pandemic because they were converted into hospitals, this segment was at zero, since convention centers are the raw material for this type of tourism.”
“In 2022 it was as if the floodgates opened and events ran wild because everyone had budgets that they had not been able to exercise. Now in 2023 and so far in 2024 the waters have leveled; That is, events went down again.”
Novelo Luján specified that this decrease in congresses and conventions does not mean that there are no events. The tourism sector, the state and municipal governments are working, and Yucatán has all the necessary conditions to compete with other markets and bring relevant events; Therefore, there is much work to do.
He also explained that the timing of meeting tourism events is what helps this activity a lot in Yucatan.
September to November is the high season for meeting tourism, and it is precisely when the holiday season is on the decline. That is the importance of complementing vacation tourism with tourism for corporate events, conferences, and conventions. Medical, corporate, union, and other types of conferences continue to arrive in Mérida because the current director of the Congress and Visitors Bureau, Eduardo Yarto Aponte, tried to further diversify this segment and promote the arrival of religious and family events.
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