British Airways Cancels Flights to Cancun

Beginning today, British Airways is canceling all flights from the UK to Cancun due to increases in COVID cases in Mexico.

CANCUN – The British Airways airline will suspend flights from the United Kingdom to the resort destination of Cancun from August 15 until September 30, which will cause Mexico to stop receiving 15.1 million dollars, the Mexican Secretariat reported this Friday of Tourism.

The airline’s decision was adopted after, as of August 8, the United Kingdom Government included Mexico in its “red list” of international travelers, due to the increase in COVID-19 infections in this country.

Mexico is in the middle of the third wave of the pandemic and has registered days with more than 20,000 new infections daily in recent days, figures that have not been seen since the second wave, last January. To date, 3.02 million cases and 246,203 deaths have been registered.

A trip to Mexico forces a UK citizen or visitor, returning to the United Kingdom, to serve a 10-day quarantine to enter that country.

The head of the Ministry of Tourism, Miguel Torruco, specified that the routes that will stop their operations in the indicated period are those that depart from Gatwick and Heathrow airports to the state of Quintana Roo.

He pointed out that during 2020 the Gatwick-Cancun route registered a flow of 73 flights with a volume of 19,300 passengers, which represented 9.7% of total arrivals at the destination.

Between January and June 2021, this same route accumulated a total of 38 British flights, with 7,629 passengers, equivalent to 6.2% of all international tourists to Cancun.

Torruco explained that based on data on the arrival of passengers to Cancun transported by the main airlines in Europe, British Airways ranked third in 2020, while in the first half of 2021 it ranked eighth.

From August 15 to September 30, British Airways had 9,640 seats purchased to Cancun: 8,644 from Gatwick and 996 from Heathrow, on 26 scheduled flights from the first and 3 flights from the latter.

Anticipated spending would have been $13.5 million from tourists arriving from Gatwick airport and $1.6 million from Heathrow. In total, $15.1 million.

On Thursday, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) indicated that Mexico’s tourism activity fell 23.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period of the previous year.

The Mexican tourism industry, which contributes 8.7% of the national GDP, will not fully recover until 2023, according to previous estimates by Torruco.

Even so, Mexico was the third most visited country in the world in 2020, according to estimates by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a temporary phenomenon attributed to flexible sanitary measures in the country’s tourist areas.

Mexico was consolidated in 2019 as one of the 10 most visited countries in the world with more than 45 million international tourists, who left 24,563 million dollars, an annual growth of 9%.

Source: LA Times