The airline British Airways will suspend flights from United Kingdom towards the resort of Cancun from August 15 until September 30, which will cause Mexico to stop receiving 15.1 million dollars, the Mexican Ministry of Tourism reported this Friday. The airline’s decision was adopted after the United Kingdom Government included Mexico in its “red list” of international travelers, as of August 8, due to the increase in COVID-19 infections in this country.
Mexico is in the middle of the third wave of the pandemic and has registered days with more than 20,000 infections newspapers in recent days, figures that were not seen since the second wave, last January, and accumulates 3.02 million cases and 246,203 deaths. A trip to Mexico by a citizen or visitor from the United Kingdom forces them to serve a 10-day quarantine to enter that country.
The head of the Ministry of Tourism, Miguel Torruco, He specified that the routes that will stop their operations in the indicated period are those that depart from Gatwick and Heathrow airports to the state of Quintana Roo, Mexican Caribbean. He pointed out that during 2020 the Gatwick-Cancun route registered a flow of 73 flights with a volume of 19,300 passengers, which represented the 9.7% of the total arrivals at the destination.
While between January and June 2021 this route accumulated a total of 38 British flights, with 7,629 passengers, equivalent to 6.2% of all international tourists to Cancun. Torruco explained that with data on the arrival of passengers to Cancun transported by the main airlines in Europe, British Airways ranked third in 2020, while in the first half of 2021 it ranked eighth.
Programming
From August 15 to September 30, British Airways had 9,640 seats scheduled to Cancun: 8,644 from Gatwick air terminal and 996 from Heathrow, on 26 flights from the first and three flights from the second. Expected spending was $ 13.5 million from tourists from Gatwick air port and $ 1.6 million from Heathrow. In total, $ 15.1 million.
On Thursday, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) indicated that the tourist activity in Mexico fell 23.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period of the previous year. The Mexican tourism industry, which contributes 8.7% of the national GDP, will not fully recover until 2023, according to previous estimates by Torruco.
Even so, Mexico was the third most visited country in the world in 2020, according to estimates by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a temporary phenomenon attributed to flexible sanitary measures in the country’s tourist areas. Mexico was consolidated in 2019 as one of the 10 most visited countries in the world with more than 45 million international tourists, who left 24,563 million dollars, an annual growth of 9%.
