Covid-19 paralyzed tourism in 2020 and its share in GDP fell 1.8 points

The sightseeing It was one of the sectors hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis and confinements, border closures or health passes. In Mexico, the pandemic caused the participation of tourism in the economy to go from 8.5% of the national GDP to 6.5%, which represents a drop of 1.8 percentage points.

During 2020, the most aggressive year in the pandemic, the total production of tourism in Mexico registered a real fall of 25.4% in year-on-year comparison, according to preliminary figures from the Inegi Tourism Satellite Account.

Bars, nightclubs and restaurants showed the steepest drop in economic production with a level 33.4% lower than in 2019; For their part, hotels and other accommodations faced a 13.3 percent drop.

This contraction is explained by the combination of restrictions on the mobility in the different states of the country, but especially due to the drop in the number of international visitors.

In fact, during this year, out of every 100 pesos that were spent in the country for tourism, 87 were spent by resident visitors; which shows that local consumption was what cushioned the crisis in tourism.

Hit to employment

The crisis faced by the tourism sector also represented the total or partial loss of thousands of jobs, which were later recovered or moved to other sectors.

In the final balance of the year, it is observed that in most of the tourism subsectors the balance of registrations and registrations continues to be negative: there are 280,038 fewer workers in tourism compared to 2019.

The strongest falls in the total number of employed persons were in the categories of cultural services (32.9%), tourism trade (23.1%) and sports and recreational services (22.8 percent).

During 2021, the timely indicators related to air and land tickets, foreign exchange income and hotel occupancy show an important recovery, although still uncertain due to the emergence of new variants and alerts in other countries of the world. Vaccination will be essential for internal and receptive tourism dynamism.