Just over 50 million tourists checked into Mexican hotel rooms in the first seven months of 2023, boosting hotel occupancy to over 60%.

In the 70 destinations monitored by the Tourism Ministry (Sectur), the percentage of hotel rooms occupied between January and June of this year was 60.2%, up 4.7% from the same period of 2022, according to Mexico’s Tourism Minister, Miguel Torruco Marqués.

An average of 261,446 hotel rooms were occupied at any one time, an increase of 11.5% from the year before.

During these seven months, 27.1 million tourists stayed in city hotels, while 23.3 million stayed in beach centers. Beach destinations achieved higher hotel occupancy, of 69.2%, compared to 52.2% in cities. However, cities showed a bigger annual increase in occupancy, of 14.7%, compared to 9% in beach centers.

The tourist destinations with the highest occupancy were all beach resorts: Akumal (85.1%), Playa del Carmen (84.1%), Cabo San Lucas (81.2%), Nuevo Nayarit (78.4%), Cancún (76.4%) and Puerto Vallarta (76.3%), Torruco said.

Of the 50.4 million tourists recorded, 36.9 million were domestic tourists (73.1%), while 13.5 million were foreigners (26.9%).

The numbers show that Mexico’s tourism industry is continuing to recover well from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with hotel occupancy now returning to pre-pandemic levels.

According to data site Statista, hotel occupancy in Mexico peaked in 2017 at 61.3% and dropped slightly to 60.3% by 2019. It then plunged to 26.1% during 2020 before recovering steadily to 41.2% in 2021 and 56.7% in 2022.

Torruco highlighted that this recovery in hotel occupancy has taken place alongside growth in the total number of hotel rooms available. He pointed out that 13,502 new rooms were built in 2021, bringing Mexico’s total to 867,328 rooms – 3.7% more than in 2019.

He hailed the hotel sector as a robust industry that is both supporting the growth of tourism in Mexico and creating positive economic spillover effects. Apart from the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, tourism has represented just over 8% of Mexico’s GDP every year since 2010 and is expected to continue to grow.

With reports from Forbes