The world is a scary place… especially when you don't have all the facts and you let scary news reports dictate your decisions.
I know firsthand how true this is. Thanks to horror stories and reports that told only of death and decrepit conditions, I had no desire to visit certain parts of the world. In fact, Central and South America were last on my list of "must see" places. Now that I’ve spent enough time in the travel industry to know you could find a reason to stay away from every place on Earth, places like Panama, Nicaragua and Ecuador are near the top of my travel "wish list."
And Cuba? Don’t even get me started on traveling to Cuba… (as soon as I'm done writing this post I'm going to pen my letter to President Obama asking for an update on when we can board flights to Cuba).
I’m ashamed to admit it, but thanks to my unfounded assumptions that the region wasn’t safe, I gave up the opportunity for a free trip to Costa Rica a decade ago. Ignorance, especially in this case, definitely is not bliss. How I wish I had that offer back again.
More recently, I witnessed my brother-in-law almost skip a family trip to Dominican Republic because it neighbors Haiti. I spent hours convincing him it was safe to go and finally got him on board with the trip by promising to buy him an earlier flight home if there were any signs of danger.
Fast forward to today's situation in Mexico and I see the same stuff happening on a much bigger scale. In mid-March, the U.S. Department of State issued a travel warning to those planning a trip to Mexico due mostly to U.S./Mexico border violence caused by drug cartels.
Safety first, that’s what I tell my kids. But it's also essential to know your facts.
The traveling public took this warning to mean that NO ONE should travel to Mexico. I took a look at Google search trends for travel keywords involving “Mexico” and I was surprised at what I saw. On March 24, there were 35 percent less (!!!) Google searches for the word “Cancun” than there were at the beginning of March — i.e., the beginning of Spring Break — before the announcement.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the chart. The blue line falling dramatically in March 2009 is the keyword Cancun’s search volume. PANIC!
I’ve been to Mexico several times and it is amazingly beautiful, and the people could not have been friendlier. Sure, you have to do what’s right for you and your family, but places like Cancun, Mayan Riviera, and the up-and-coming Riviera Nayarit are safe and definitely worth the trip, and more importantly, there are excellent airfare and hotel deals to these places.
Here are some other great ideas for travel to Mexico.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, maybe you’ll listen to Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World" who said “to travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Sage advice indeed.
© Cheapflights Ltd Carl Schwartz
