Tourism has suf­fered as drug-related vio­lence across the bor­der has surged. But can­cel­ing a vaca­tion to Los Cabos or the Mayan Riv­iera may not be necessary.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123931839488506787.html

By CANDACE JACKSON

Teresa Bitler thought about spend­ing Easter this year loung­ing on the beach in Puerto Penasco, Mex­ico, with her hus­band and two daugh­ters. Then she changed her mind.

“We heard about the drug vio­lence down there,” says Ms. Bitler, who lives near Phoenix. She envi­sioned the 4½-hour drive, much of it through vast stretches of empty Mex­i­can desert. Instead, the fam­ily is going to Dis­ney­land this weekend.

Just a few months ago, Amer­i­can travel to Mex­ico was boom­ing. Despite the eco­nomic down­turn in the U.S., Mex­ico reported a 14% increase in vis­i­tors in Jan­u­ary over the pre­vi­ous year, spurred by a strong U.S. dol­lar against the Mex­i­can peso and a wave of Amer­i­can tourists who wanted to stay close to home. Eighty mil­lion Amer­i­cans vis­ited Mex­ico last year alone, accord­ing to the Mex­ico Tourism Board, mak­ing tourism a $13.2 bil­lion indus­try, and Mexico’s third-highest rev­enue stream.

By Feb­ru­ary, news was break­ing daily about grow­ing grisly vio­lence between war­ring fac­tions of Mexico’s drug car­tels. Behead­ings, kid­nap­pings and tor­ture dom­i­nated head­lines. The U.S. State Depart­ment issued a travel alert for Mex­ico in late Feb­ru­ary, updat­ing one issued in Octo­ber, cit­ing “increased vio­lence near the U.S. bor­der” and cau­tion­ing that “dozens” of Amer­i­cans have been kid­napped across Mex­ico in recent years. George J. Tenet, the for­mer Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency direc­tor, urged his college-age son to can­cel a spring-break trip to Aca­pulco, based on news reports he’d read; an exag­ger­ated email about the exchange quickly made the rounds at col­lege campuses.

All of this has many trav­el­ers won­der­ing: Is Mex­ico still safe for tourists?

Despite the travel alert, “we are not advis­ing peo­ple not to go to Mex­ico,” says Heide Bronke Ful­ton, a State Depart­ment spokes­woman. She adds that the main areas of con­cern are cities and towns near the U.S. bor­der. Travel alerts, which can cau­tion against every­thing from cyclone sea­son to ter­ror­ism threats, are far less severe than the State Department’s “warn­ings,” in place for coun­tries like Iraq and Sudan, which essen­tially advise against trav­el­ing to a coun­try altogether.

Secu­rity experts say tourists can safely travel to Mex­ico — if they stay within known resort areas, avoid trav­el­ing to Mex­ico by road and steer clear of U.S. bor­der areas. Mike Ack­er­man, pres­i­dent of the Ack­er­man Group, an inves­tiga­tive secu­rity firm, says most of the drug-trade crime within Mex­ico is “narco on narco” vio­lence or vio­lence against police. Kid­nap­ping, another grow­ing prob­lem in Mex­ico, almost always tar­gets wealthy Mex­i­cans, not Amer­i­cans or other foreigners.

To coun­ter­act ris­ing fears about travel south of the bor­der, Mexico’s tourism indus­try has gone on a public-relations offen­sive. Hotels are offer­ing dis­counts. Resort areas have beefed up secu­rity. They’re try­ing to spread a key mes­sage: Mex­ico is a large, diverse coun­try, and not every area has been affected by the increase in drug vio­lence. Most of the tourist and resort areas are sep­a­rated by hun­dreds of miles from the volatile bat­tle­grounds of the drug war. Stay­ing away from Puerto Val­larta because of what’s going on in Ciu­dad Juárez would be like not trav­el­ing to Nebraska because of some­thing hap­pen­ing in New York City, tourism offi­cials say.

Still, resorts as far as 1,300 miles away from the core of Mexico’s drug vio­lence say they imme­di­ately saw a wave of can­cel­la­tions after the travel alert was issued. At other hotels, new book­ings sim­ply stopped rolling in. Travel agents say they began field­ing phone calls from con­cerned clients want­ing to know if they should can­cel their vacations.

Jim Swickard, owner of the Hacienda de los San­tos in Alamos, a resort town in the Sonora region, in west­ern Mex­ico, says that after the U.S. issued the fall travel alert, Jan­u­ary book­ings at the lux­ury resort dropped by nearly 50% from a year ear­lier. He says that if busi­ness con­tin­ues this way, he’ll have to cut his staff of 55 down to 25 by summertime.

Mr. Swickard, whose resort is nearly 400 miles from Nogales, says he has never had an inci­dent of vio­lence or kid­nap­ping with a tourist stay­ing at his resort, or dri­ving from the U.S. en route to the resort. “We don’t have a drug war going on in Alamos,” he says.

Last month, Mexico’s Tourism Board launched a new Web site, Mexico-Update.com, which has video tes­ti­mo­ni­als from trav­el­ers who have vis­ited Mex­ico recently and a map meant to clar­ify which areas were included in the U.S. government’s travel alert. Areas with red “alert” dots include Tijuana, Ciu­dad Juárez, Nogales and Chi­huahua, all cities in the north­west part of the coun­try that are near the U.S. border.

Karisma Hotels, which has seven prop­er­ties in Mex­ico, has seen busi­ness decline by 20% since the the travel alert. Now the com­pany is offer­ing upgrades for guests stay­ing four nights or more at resorts like Azul Beach Hotel and El Dorado Royale in Riv­iera Maya, as well as pro­mo­tions for free or dis­counted air­fare. Pueblo Bonito Lux­ury Hotels & Resorts, which has four hotels in Los Cabos, is offer­ing a fourth night free for every three nights booked, and the sev­enth night free for every six nights.

The drug trade has affected some tourist des­ti­na­tions. Can­cún, a city that’s also seen a real-estate boom, is smack in the mid­dle of a major drug route to the U.S. Drug car­tels, bat­tling for con­trol, have infil­trated the local police and killed a num­ber of secu­rity offi­cials, includ­ing a retired army gen­eral. As a result, the Mex­i­can army has taken over most polic­ing duties. But tourists have been unaf­fected by the gang­land violence.

Many resorts and des­ti­na­tions have stepped up secu­rity. For the first time, vis­i­tors to the Can­cún area over spring break were met with more mil­i­tary check­points along the road from the air­port to the resorts. New this year in the Los Cabos area are “tourist police,” who are dressed more casu­ally than reg­u­lar police offi­cers and there to help vis­i­tors with direc­tions or trans­la­tions. They’re also accom­pa­nied by drug-sniffing dogs at cer­tain times of day, says Miroslava Bautista, the area’s tourism director.

Some resorts say vis­i­bly increas­ing secu­rity can make tourists more ner­vous. Vis­i­tors “see more secu­rity and police and they feel afraid,” says Alan Dug­gan, the vice pres­i­dent of sales for Star­wood Hotels, Latin Amer­ica, “espe­cially if you don’t need” the secu­rity. Resorts like the St. Regis in Punta Mita and the Westin Puerto Val­larta saw book­ings drop by about 15% after the travel advi­sory, he says, while urban busi­ness travel hotels in areas like Mex­ico City didn’t see much of a drop-off, despite reports of increased crime in those areas.

Mex­ico tourism took a hit dur­ing spring-break sea­son last month, when sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties advised stu­dents against going to Mex­ico. In Feb­ru­ary, Carol Thomp­son, the dean of stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Ari­zona, in Tuc­son, sent an email to stu­dents with a link to the government’s travel alert and a note “strongly advis[ing] stu­dents to avoid travel to Mexico.”

Natalia Var­gas, a senior at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity, had planned to travel to Puerto Val­larta this year for spring break with her room­mates, book­ing flights and hotel rooms in Jan­u­ary. Two weeks before they were set to hit the beach, Ms. Var­gas and her friends heard from their par­ents that they no longer felt com­fort­able let­ting their chil­dren make the trip.

After some debate, Ms. Var­gas and her friends decided to spend spring break in Florida instead.

Though the U.S. gov­ern­ment says its records aren’t com­pre­hen­sive, the lead­ing cause of unnat­ural death in Mex­ico for an Amer­i­can tourist — by far — is car acci­dent, accord­ing to State Depart­ment data. In 2008, 56 of the 81 mil­lion Amer­i­can cit­i­zens who vis­ited or lived in Mex­ico were vic­tims of homi­cide, up from 35 homi­cides the pre­vi­ous year. An esti­mated 6,000 peo­ple were killed in Mexico’s drug trade last year.

The increased vio­lence has scared off some busi­ness trav­el­ers, as well as tourists. Steve Rud­ner, a lawyer who rep­re­sents resorts, says since late Feb­ru­ary he’s taken on sev­eral cases against cor­po­rate groups who have can­celed their meet­ings in Mex­ico and are try­ing to get out of hav­ing to pay, cit­ing safety concerns.

Adam Arm­bruster, a broadcast-management con­sul­tant from Sara­sota, Fla., agreed in Jan­u­ary to give a keynote address at a May con­fer­ence in Mex­ico City. Then he became ner­vous after read­ing news reports about increas­ing vio­lence and kid­nap­pings, though he’s been to Mex­ico City in the past. After con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a per­sonal secu­rity guard, he decided that “it wasn’t worth it,” he says, can­cel­ing and giv­ing up his five-figure speak­ing fee. “I’ve got a wife and kids at home.”

Though sta­tis­ti­cally a tourist’s chances of becom­ing a crime vic­tim are very slim in Mex­ico, those who have been say deal­ing with local author­i­ties can prove frus­trat­ing. K. Jill Rigby, a travel edi­tor from Toronto spend­ing four months in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city known as a haven for expats and artists, was mugged in Feb­ru­ary in an attack that left her on crutches for two weeks.

She doesn’t think her mug­ging was related to the drug trade. Instead, she cites another con­cern in the coun­try: the grow­ing gap between wealthy and poor res­i­dents in tourist areas like hers. Increas­ingly, young, unem­ployed Mex­i­cans are return­ing home from the U.S. because they can no longer find work dur­ing the eco­nomic down­turn. She says that report­ing the crime was oner­ous, and that although there were sev­eral wit­nesses, her attack­ers still haven’t been appre­hended by local police. Dis­trict Attor­ney Jose Anto­nio Aguil­era declined to com­ment, say­ing he wasn’t allowed to dis­cuss crim­i­nal cases by telephone.

Tijuana, a bor­der city once pop­u­lar with U.S. day trip­pers who came to buy trin­kets or drink in local bars, is one of the areas at the cen­ter of the drug trade. Sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple were killed there last year in drug-related vio­lence, some of them shot on the street dur­ing the day. Vis­i­tors have been declin­ing steadily, and more than 20% of busi­nesses in the tourist dis­trict have closed, accord­ing to Jahdiel Var­gas, the direc­tor of Tijuana’s Con­ven­tion and Vis­i­tors Bureau.

Now the city is try­ing to win back tourists. In Jan­u­ary, Tijuana opened a “fast lane” for vis­i­tors stay­ing in hotels or eat­ing in high-end restau­rants to avoid long lines while cross­ing the bor­der. In March, the city launched a new tourism cam­paign, 120 Things to Do in Tijuana, for Tijuana’s 120th anniver­sary. “It was pretty vio­lent for a cou­ple months there,” says Mr. Var­gas. “But 90% of that was just focused on the mob or the drug cartels.”

Many trav­el­ers haven’t can­celed their Mex­ico travel plans, espe­cially those vis­it­ing estab­lished resort areas of Mex­ico. Stacy Small, a Brent­wood, Calif.-based travel agent, recently returned from Ixtapa and Los Cabos, where she says “there wasn’t any evi­dence of prob­lems.” Out of more than a dozen clients she’s booked into the area, she says, sev­eral have called to ask her about safety, but so far only one has ended up chang­ing plans.

Last week, Mike and Ann McGib­bon stayed at the Azul Sen­satori Hotel in Riv­iera Maya, about 1,300 miles from Chi­huahua, with their 10-year-old daugh­ter. The fam­ily has trav­eled to the area before, and the only change in their plans this time was that they didn’t “dilly dally at the air­port” in Can­cún, says Mr. McGib­bon, a health-care com­pany gen­eral man­ager from Lib­er­tyville, Ill. They spent their days walk­ing along the beach, swim­ming and read­ing by the pool. “At no point did I feel unsafe,” says Mrs. McGibbon.

—Jose de Cor­doba con­tributed to this article.

Write to Can­dace Jack­son at candace.jackson@wsj.com