Visit Houston And Mexico Partner To Show How Walls Can Unite Us
by Cheryl Rosen /
Houston, TX, has launched an innovative exchange program with the Mexico Tourism Board designed to use art to promote travel between the two countries in an era of Trump talk.
Among the many artists and chefs involved, for example, is a muralist playing off the theme of walls between the two countries; his murals, being painted on walls across Mexico, are “an opportunity to use walls to unite people and bring them together,” Visit Houston’s senior VP of tourism Jorge Franz told TMR at Tianguis in Mexico on Tuesday.
Houston, a major United Airlines hub with lots of service to Mexico, counts our southern neighbor as its #1 international source market, Franz said. More than 2 million travelers from Mexico visited Houston in 2015, spending an average $1,300 per person per trip, triple the spend of the average U.S. visitor.
Despite the rhetoric from the White House, Franz said he expects travel from Mexico to remain flat this year rather than to decline (though in 2015 Houston saw an increase of almost 15%).
In the United States, meanwhile, Houston is “doing a lot of training and fam trips with travel agents interested in investigating a new urban destination” with a blossoming assortment of culinary offerings recently highlighted by Anthony Bourdain.