Only three hotels are open in Puerto Vallarta, in which there are only 29 rooms occupied out of the 39 thousand in the city, which at Easter are usually saturated.
“Puerto Vallarta is closed,” Ramón González Lomelí , director of tourism for the municipality, told Notimex, who explained that in total, there are 42,000 rooms, if condominiums are included, in the Hotel Zone and Old Town.
“The Westin Resort has nine occupied rooms, the Comfort Inn, which is two stars has 13 and the Crown Paradise Golden has seven, there are 29 rooms in total with people whose companies have agreements with the brands,” he said.
The 35 four and five-star hotels, which have 10,000 rooms, are closed, as are the beaches and all the tourist services such as tours and recreational water activities.
“98 percent of Puerto Vallarta’s economy depends on tourism, it could be said that one hundred percent, because in a direct or indirect way, everything is connected with tourism, from a dentist to small farmers,” explained González Lomelí.
In a monitoring of the room rental platforms in the municipality, the authorities warned of zero mobility of transactions, but there is no exact data on the occupation of condominiums because they are privately owned.
“It is not a service provider and the city council cannot do anything. Many people from Guadalajara arrive and it is their home, those who arrived went to Nuevo Vallarta, the activity is null on platforms, those who have traveled own their homes,” he asserted.
The Puerto Vallarta City Council has had no reports of mass layoffs and estimates that most of the 200 hotels maintain their workforce, although some took “solidarity days” without pay.
“Those who are in a delicate situation are small, medium-sized hotels, which are 16 in the city, they are going to be hit very hard because they are run by families,” said the official, who announced that they have already started the work to trace destination recovery strategies.
Among the strategies that businessmen and authorities will work to carry out after the health emergency, are incentives and discounts to reactivate the visit of tourists “and make it too attractive for people to come to Puerto Vallarta,” concluded Ramón González Lomelí.
