Puerto Vallarta Suffers further Flight Cancellations

A losing streak for the tourism industry is predicted for the summer of this year in Puerto Vallarta; Two events, exposed to the public light in the last few hours, have alerted the promoters and entrepreneurs of this region: the alleged cancellation of the flight route from Finland and of 13,000 young American tourists who would come to the bay for the so-called “Spring Breakers”.

Regarding the first event, the undersecretary of Tourism of Jalisco, Willi Saaveedra, informed in a press conference that his agency does not have any official information coming from the airline Finnair yet. Since last Monday morning different businessmen and hoteliers have been spreading this version as a fact.

“Unofficially we heard in the morning that Finnair was canceling the flight, officially we do not have any information. We will see what we can do to prevent this from happening,” said SECTUR Jalisco official.
In addition, he reaffirmed that it is very important that the flight doesn´t get cancelled, because the European tourism brings unique characteristics to Puerto Vallarta and Riviera Nayarit in a market with 25 million potential visitors.

It should be mentioned that just a month ago Puerto Vallarta was present at the world tourist fair ‘Matka’, held in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and representatives of Puerto Vallarta announced “promising expectations” with Nordic European tourism, taking advantage of the connectivity for this direct flight.

This 2019 there will be no “spring breakers”

On the other hand, the same day it was announced that around 13,000 young American tourists would have canceled their visit to Puerto Vallarta and Riviera Nayarit the summer season for “spring break”, which has been happening in Mexico for about 30 years.

Although Jalisco’s tourism undersecretary, Willi Saaveedra, did not give details about this unprecedented event, recognized businessmen have already given some explanations about the unfortunate news, such is the case of Martín Rodríguez Felix, head of the local agency “North American Travel” and vice-president of the National Chamber of Commerce in Puerto Vallarta.

The reasons why travel agencies will cancel their agendas by 2019, the businessman explained, are mainly “Donald Trump´s negative comments about Mexico and the abuses of some providers of tourist services and conflicts in public transport “.

But also, “the robberies and abuses suffered by many tourists influenced this decision,”
Martín Rodríguez Felix told Quadrantín.

“I saw this coming,” confessed the businessman, who also explained that the organization is working to convince young Americans to return for the season of 2020, so in his opinion “not all is lost”.

The cancellation of the spring break is a hard blow to the tourist industry of Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit, which would stop receiving an estimated 13,000 visitors for this spring according to estimates for 2019.