All the days where you expected a simple flash of your driver's license or your beautiful tan to be a testimony of your ethnicity to travel from Cancun or the Caribbean are soon going to be over. From 1st of June 2009, the government of the United States is placing the laws of Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) into effect as a means of stabilizing and strengthening the borders involving Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, the Caribbean region and the United States.
You would need to get your Passport in order to go in and out of these multifold places. Therefore, the simplest solution to steering the government's policies is to get a Passport. Even though you might be able to travel to a few of your neighboring places with only your license or Identification Card but in order to get in the States, you would need your Passport. To cut it short and that too, simply, you need to produce your passport, in order to travel home by air. According to the regulations of WHTI, you would even need to produce your passport if you are crossing the border checkpoint via a boat, in your car, or even by foot. The declaration of you citizenship would no longer work.
And just to recap the previous statements, WHTI now requires all the travelers to offer their passport or other ?approved secure document? which denotes your identity and your citizenship for travel through sea, land or air. This regulation from WHTI is applicable to all the people of the United States, Canada or Bermuda who were formerly excused from providing their passports. Your options now strictly remain to present either your Passport or a membership of a Trusted Traveler Card program such as NEXUS which is used for travel involving the United States and Canada, or SENTRI which is used for travel linking the United States and Mexico.
Two new programs are also provided for your aid in order to provide accommodation for this initiative, they are, the U.S. Passport Card, which is fine for traveling through land or sea but would not wok for air travel. The second program is the Enhanced Driver's License, which once again is only for land and sea travel and not for air. This card is presently only issued by the states of New York, Vermont and Michigan. All under the age of 16 are exempt from this and may only present their birth certificate.
All the Mexican Citizens are not influenced by WHTI. The Mexican nationals, with the inclusion of children, are presently to show their passport with a non-immigrant visa. They can even show a laser visa Border Crossing Card in order to go across the U.S. border. This prerequisite is also applicable to the members of SENTRI program.
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Given that some 5.3 million of the 21.3 million international tourists visiting Mexico in 2006 were Americans traveling by air, spending an average of US$798 per stay, the resulting US$254 million in lost revenue will amount to only 2.2 percent of the US$11.6 billion in international tourism revenues his country expected to post for the year, he explained.
Mexico’s Tourism Secretary added that the number of Americans who traveled to Mexico by air and did not have passports dropped to merely six percent by January 2007, in part due to an informational campaign launched in October 2006 by the Mexico Tourism Board with the support of tour operators, travel agents and other travel industry representatives.
The initiatives implemented or planned by Mexico to educate consumers about the United States’ new passport requirement have included news releases, micromedia flashes; information packets; consumer contests and events; and promotional materials, such as passport holders. The MTB also added the slogan “We want you back in Mexico. Please get a passport" to its advertising in an attempt to entice U.S. citizens to obtain their passports.
In addition to the Mexico Tourism Board’s efforts, destinations that receive large numbers of American tourists are also doing their part to educate Americans about the law. The Cancun Convention and Visitors Bureau has launched “V.I.P., Very Important Passport" program encouraging U.S. visitors to spread the word. The campaign will include posters created for high-traffic U.S. vacationer sites that include relevant U.S. passport information and the U.S. Department of State website address. They have also distributed hundreds of thousands of informational coupons about the new passport requirement, some of which are imprinted by local retailers with an individual message of their own, ranging from a discount to special value offer.
“Our campaign will reach virtually every American visitor vacationing in Cancun for the next three months," said Artemio Santos, chief executive officer for the Cancun CVB. “We are providing tourism businesses like hotels, restaurants, shops, and attractions with the necessary information and tools to reach visitors to Cancun several times during an individual vacationer’s stay. This is a destination-wide undertaking," said Santos.
Tour operators and travel agents are also strategizing to educate their customers on the new law. Funjet, one of the top U.S. tour operators for Mexico, has created an online program to inform travel agents on the new requirements and how to reach out to their customers proactively regarding passports. The program includes guidelines for organizing “passport parties" for consumers, designed to facilitate passport processing for people who have traveled to Mexico in the past with other forms of identification. Additionally, Apple Vacations has initiated a promotion for a free passport with the slogan, “You fly, we buy."
The WHTI will not go into effect until 2008 for cruise passengers and 2009 for road travelers. For more information, please visit http://travel.state.gov/passport and www.visitmexico.com.
About the Mexico Tourism Board The Mexico Tourism Board (MTB) brings together the resources of federal and state governments, municipalities and private companies to promote Mexico's tourism attractions and destinations internationally. Created in 1999, the MTB is Mexico’s tourism promotion agency, and its participants include members of both the private and public sectors. The MTB has offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
FOR PRESS ONLY: For additional ideas, help with a story or general travel and tourism information about Mexico, please contact the MTB’s North American Press Room directly at 1-800-929-4555, by e-mail at northamericanpress@visitmexico.com, or visit our press Web site at www.visitmexicopress.com. To access an online warehouse of free, downloadable b-roll, visit www.thenewsmarket.com/visitmexicopress.
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