New data from the national statistics agency (INEGI) shows Mexico’s tourism sector continues to grow in 2024, a trend that has been unabated since the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2021.
The data reveals that second-quarter economic growth in the tourism sector reached 5.8% compared to last year.
On Thursday, INEGI released its report on Quarterly Tourism Activity Indicators for this year’s second quarter.
The new data shows that the overall 5.8% growth in tourism GDP results from a 7% year-on-year increase in tourism services provided and a 1% rise in tourism goods sold, the news site Aristegui Noticias reported.
Though foreign visitors in Mexico often drive tourism spending, overall tourism consumption in Q2 rose 1.9% primarily because of spending by domestic tourists, INEGI found.
The data indicates that spending by Mexican tourists rose 2.6%, while spending by foreign tourists dipped by 2.5% in the second quarter of 2024 compared to Q2 of 2023.
Compared to the first trimester of the year, the numbers were less positive.
Impacting the calculations this year was the fact that the Easter Week (Semana Santa) holiday — popular in Mexico for domestic travelers — fell in the first quarter of the year for the first time since 2018. As a result, tourism-related growth in the first quarter was unusually strong.
INEGI data for Q2 of 2024 bore this out as tourism-related GDP was down slightly — 0.4% — when compared to Q1 of this year. Meanwhile, tourism spending in Q2 this year contracted by 1% as compared to Q1.
Tourism jobs in Mexico on the rise
In addition to the solid revenue numbers, employment in Mexico’s tourism sector also rose considerably in the second quarter.
In September, Mexico’s then-Tourism Minister Miguel Torruco announced that the number of people employed in the tourism sector during Q2 of 2024 rose to over 4.8 million, a number which could include temporary and contract workers.
This boosted tourism employment to constitute 9% of Mexico’s employed population, according to the website Travel 2 LatAm, and represented a 0.6% increase over employment in the tourism goods and services production sector during the first quarter of 2024.
It also represented a 3.1% year-on-year increase, with 148,058 more people employed in the tourism sector during Q2 2024 than were employed in Q2 2023.
Total tourism employment during 2024’s second quarter was also significantly above the record figure in the first quarter of 2020, when approximately 4.5 million people were employed in the sector.
In raw numbers, the tourism sector employed 373,496 more people by the end of 2024’s second quarter than it did before the pandemic hit.
With reports from Aristegui Noticias and Forbes México
