Background

Due to the scarcity of tourism information analysed in the State, it was necessary to work on generating a strategy that would contribute to the improvement of public policy management as well as to the strengthening of the tourism sector due to its importance for Tamaulipas.  The lack of information on tourism activity indicators presented us with a great challenge. 

In the first place, we had the need to start working with basic information that would help us quickly and effectively to obtain basic data on the movement of the sector and give us a more concrete picture of what tourism represents in Tamaulipas in order to be able to make decisions about the objectives and goals to be achieved in the coming years and to observe, through the analysis of the information, the development of tourism activity and to have feedback to know if the actions we are taking are having the results we expect. 

In this sense, we began to ask ourselves what we wanted to know about those who visit us and what tools we needed to update in order to have basic information that would give us the guidelines to understand what is happening in our State.

So we start with these first questions:

1. How many and who are the tourism service providers in Tamaulipas?

2. What type of tourists visit the state?

3. Where do they visit us from?

4. How do they arrive? 

5. How often do they come?

6. Where do they stay? 

7. How much do they spend?

8. How and where did they find out about Tamaulipas?

9. What do they want to get out of their visit to the state?

Why?

To have an integral and public tool that helps the government and the different sectors of the economy to make decisions, and to generate management mechanisms based on local realities.

What is it?

It is a permanent body dedicated to the research, analysis, evaluation and consultation of tourism activity in its different modalities, through intersectoral and multidisciplinary work that makes it possible to measure and monitor tourism activity, as well as the variables that affect it.

Its Objectives (Article 2 of the Creation Agreement):

l. To measure and evaluate the performance of the tourism sector from the global perspective of society and government; as well as its contribution to the general development of the State; 

ll. To generate tourism information for permanent consultation within the reach of society, academia, government and interest groups; 

III. To identify social phenomena that affect the development of the tourism sector in the State; 

IV. To propose the linking of the performance of the tourism sector with other strategic processes of development, such as competitiveness, sustainability and social inclusion in the State; 

V. To promote studies and research in tourism matters; and 

VI. To generate information to facilitate and guide decision-making as well as the implementation of actions by the public, educational, private and social sectors. 

The objective of this research was to establish new hygiene and health prevention measures to be added to the existing ones, in the management of the reopening of nature destinations and sites, beaches, hunting ranches and sport fishing camps for the greater safety of users. The State Government through the Ministry of Health published on 30 May 2020 the Agreement by which sanitary and health safety guidelines are issued for the gradual and responsible reopening of non-essential economic activities in the State, based on the recommendation of the State Health Safety Committee and whose purpose was to establish the measures that should be applied to non-core activities to resume operations, prioritising actions to reduce the risk of coronavirus infection, which was implemented as of 1 June 2020 and where the reactivation of two tourism sectors, lodging and restaurants, was contemplated. 

Based on these guidelines and international health measures for tourist centres, the Sustainable Tourism Observatory, in coordination with the Ministry of Tourism and COEPRIS, developed the protocols for the Reopening of the New Reality with Safe Coexistence in Economic Activities not essential to the Tourism Sector, applicable to the following destinations:

• Nature (resorts, rivers, rivers, dams, natural areas)

• Beaches (recreation and leisure)

• Hunting Ranches and Sport Fishing Camps 

Beach mapping

Tamaulipas has 420 kilometres of coastline with the Gulf of Mexico, where 6 main beaches are located in the state. The most popular beach in Tamaulipas during the holiday season, Playa Miramar in Ciudad Madero, was taken as the study area. 

During the planning work for the reopening of the beaches, inspection visits were carried out to determine the best way to organise tourists and visitors within the open spaces and the way in which access to these sites would be organised. Authorities from the three levels of government were involved in these visits. 

Each of the 6 beaches (due to their vocation and the historical number of tourists), was divided into sections according to their characteristics, estimating the maximum capacity of capacity according to the healthy distance necessary to avoid contagion, also considering a traffic light to monitor the capacity of each section so that, at each hour, the capacity of each section would be shared with the other beaches, The information was shared every hour through the social networks of the Ministry of Tourism to inform people about the behaviour of the entrance to the beaches (all this prior to the launch of the COMPRA TAM application and the RESERVA PLAYAS module where the number of people who entered the reserved section could be known in real time).