For the last four years I've worked for an educational travel company sending American teachers and groups of their students to tour countries around the world. While Mexico has never been our #1 destination, it has always been one of the most affordable travel destination for Spanish teachers and generally viewed as safe and educational from a language and historical perspective (as long as the itinerary didn't include Cancun, understandably due to prejudice many parents felt towards Cancun and its association with booze-filled Spring Break stories). As long as a teacher did her homework and presented all of the learning opportunities of visiting archaeological sites, like Chichen Itza, and cities with interesting colonial history, like Merida, the low tour costs made it a pretty easy sell to most parents. That was up until early last year when it seemed like every US media outlet was publishing or doing an evening news report on "Mexico: The War Next Door." School boards and parents started to go on edge, and I started to get a steady stream of e-mails from clients expressing concerns that their Mexico tours were going to be cancelled due to complaints being brought to administrators about the destination they had chosen. Parents were accusing them of "endangering" their students lives. Many good-intentioned teachers, wanting to give their students an international experience at the lowest possible cost, were facing tough battles to recruit travelers for the same trips that would have filled quickly with 20+ students the year before. I'd say I really saw the first signs of problems with Mexico tour recruiters as early as January of 2009 stretching through to March, when teachers were still willing at least to try to promote Mexico itineraries but were being met with serious opposition to their recruitment efforts. The failure rate was much higher for a teacher who chose Mexico as her destination than any other location, which was sad to see.
My own friends and family expressed serious concerns when I informed them that I'd be headed to Merida, Mexico myself for a month long work assignment during the months of January and February. You would have thought I told them I was going to go walk a tight rope without a net considering all of the "are you sure you want to do that?" and "be careful!" warnings that I received. I was seriously surprised that no one bought me a bullet-proof vest as a bon voyage present (I mean what were they thinking letting me go to Mexico unprotected like that?? Didn't they care?). I arrived in Mexico via Cancun and bussed out to Merida, a single 25-year old female all on her own, I know, gasp...the horror! I remember settling in and looking around the city and thinking to myself, what the heck is all the fuss about?? The size of the guns that the police force carried and the somewhat poor conditions of the roads were the scariest things in the entire city/region (and I did a lot of traveling throughout the Yucutan in the form of weekend trips so I can legitimately claim to have explored the region extensively). I never once saw any form of crime while I was there, and who'd want to try anything stupid when the police are toting around semi-automatic weapons and patroling the streets regularly as they do in Merida? I was able to walk anywhere in the city at night and never once felt threatened. I mean on my short walk from the T stop to our office everyday in Boston I'd see on average at least 2 drug deals go down in broad daylight. There was none of that in Merida. No stories of creepy stalkers following girls home like I'd hear about on a regular basis in my Somerville neighborhood. Merida, Mexico was a far safer place to visit/live than any city I'd ever lived in in the US. I tried to use stories of my first-hand experience from visiting Mexico to help my recruiters working on Mexico trips to calm the fears of nervous parents, and it helped some, but it was already a losing battle.
As if Mexico wasn't receiving enough bad press as it was about the escalation of violence in border areas, the US Travel Department went and issued a Travel Alert against Mexico while I was here visiting, and parents freaked out! They didn't understand that a Travel Alert is just that, an alert, advising Americans to use common-sense when traveling in a country and to avoid the areas of escalating violence. I was writing 1-2 e-mails a day explaining what the Travel Alert meant for travel to Mexico to help group leaders put to rest worries from principals, parents, etc. Many schools thought it would mean that our company would cancel the trips and issue full refunds back to the students enrolled on those trips. Since thousands of dollars was tied up in group flight space being held for these tours, we weren't likely to do that. It didn't seem to matter to these parents that the areas of escalated violence were THOUSANDS of miles away from where their children would be visiting and that the violence was in fact occuring in areas close to the US border due to the drug cartels trying to get their goods past Mexico's armed forces and into the US. To give an American comparison, it was as if people were concerned about traveling to Kansas because of gang wars taking place in LA. No one would cancel a trip to Kansas because there was an escalation in violence in LA, but that's what parents were calling for in regards to Mexico.
It was during this period that I received several different communications from parents informing me that they'd be cancelling their children from Mexico tours. Now, I generally deal only with the teachers planning the trips and the parents are directed to our customer care department so I can focus on the group-level questions of our planners, but distraught parents always found a way to let me know their intentions of cancelling their child's account. I tried my best to help retain the travelers but it was an impossible battle with emotion always winning out over reason. One of my favorites was the father who yelled at me for a good 20 minutes asking how could we possibly think of sending his daughter to Mexico?, it was a war zone, and added "don't you watch FOX News??" He didn't even want to hear it when I told him that I'd just spent 6 weeks there and it was definitely not a war zone, contrary to what the news reports wanted him to believe. I really did my best to stay professional, but I think I may have actually chuckled at the Fox News comment, which I'm sure he didn't appreciate. I promptly forwarded him on to the customer care department when I realized there was no reasoning with him. I also received an e-mail from a mom informing me that she'd be withdrawing her son from his planned tour to Mexico and even though he was quite furious with her, she knew it was what she had to do. Against my better judgement, I wrote the mother a very nice e-mail back discussing my recent time spent in the country and encouraging her to take some to time to think it over because it would really be a "rewarding experience" for her son to travel with his schoolmates to Mexico. She responded with an equally cordial e-mail expressing that she already had done some serious soul searching and boiled all of her thoughts down to "I'm sorry, I just can't risk my 16-year-old's life..." and then concluded the e-mail with a series of not one, but 3 different photos of her son in question, so that I would get a "clear picture" the life of the son she just could not risk. After those two parental interactions, I knew the battle was lost.
The final nail in the coffin came for Mexico tours in April of 2009 when the outbreak of the H1N1 (swine) flu epidemic was announced and the origins of the new influenza strain were traced to Mexico. Even the group leaders who muscled through the first few months of the year to keep students enrolled on their 2009 trips to Mexico were all but forced to change their destinations. A few brave souls stuck with their Mexico plans, and due to Mexico's quick and thorough reaction to containing the spread of H1N1 by closing business and public arenas for a week, the Mexico tours that ran during the spring and summer of 2009 were overall very successful. Most of the other groups ended up changing their destination to Costa Rica, a country which has plenty of its own internal crime problems, but a better reputation in the US media. A group that had already started enrolling for a 2010 trip to Mexico was even forced by their school board to change the destination to Costa Rica during the H1N1 maddness much to the disappointment of the teacher organizing the trip. A year later, and there are next to no new cases of H1N1 being reported in Mexico but it's still making rounds through US schools.
The ramifications of all of 2009's bad press for Mexico has resulted in a serious decline in student travel to Mexico for business year 2010. Now that I'm living full-time in Mexico and can really appreciate all it has to offer in terms of history and culture, I definitely am sad to see how few groups will be visiting this year. Here's hopin' that Mexico makes a strong return for 2011!
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