Bold Booking: Our Travel Risk Reality

There’s a particular moment I know well. I’m sitting somewhere cold, a decent pint within reach, and Tina is on her laptop pulling up flights to somewhere warm. It feels like a good idea. It always feels like a good idea. And then I make the mistake of checking the news.

This week, that news is Mexico. If you haven’t been following it, the short version is that the Mexican military killed the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on February 22, which triggered a wave of roadblocks, vehicle fires, and a shelter-in-place advisory covering most of the country’s major tourist destinations. Tourists in Puerto Vallarta woke up to smoke over their beachfront hotels and discovered their flights home had been cancelled. Our team at Boarding Pass Travel has a full breakdown of what’s happening and what Canadian travellers need to do right now; read it here.

This isn’t the first time Mexico has made headlines mid-booking season. It won’t be the last. And before anyone asks: no, we haven’t stopped going. But we also don’t book blind. So today I want to walk you through what our actual risk assessment conversation looks like before we commit to a destination, whether that’s Mexico, the Caribbean, or anywhere else that shows up on Tina’s laptop screen when she’s feeling optimistic.

Why Mexico Keeps Earning Another Chance

We’ve been to Mexico multiple times now. Puerto Morelos twice, Puerto Vallarta once with a buddy (long story, see this post), and Tina has done several industry FAM trips through the Yucatan. In all of those visits, we’ve never felt personally unsafe. Not once. And I say that as someone who pays attention to surroundings and doesn’t just float through life assuming the universe is friendly.

The reason we keep going back is the same reason twenty-plus million tourists visit Mexico each year. The beaches are exceptional, the food is borderline religious, the value is difficult to beat leaving from a Canadian airport in February, and the people are genuinely warm. Mexico isn’t a dangerous country the way some headlines make it sound. It’s a complicated country. Those are different things.

But complication requires a response. Ignoring it doesn’t make you adventurous; it makes you uninformed. So here’s how we actually think about it.

The Conversation We Have Before Every Booking

Tina and I have been travelling together long enough that we’ve developed an unofficial pre-booking ritual. It’s not a spreadsheet or a formal checklist. It’s a conversation, usually over dinner, and it covers a few specific questions we’ve learned to ask the hard way over the years.

First: what does the Global Affairs Canada advisory actually say right now? Not what it said six months ago, not what someone in a Facebook group remembers it saying. Right now. The advisory page at travel.gc.ca breaks down every country into regions and levels, from “take normal security precautions” all the way to “avoid all travel.” Most of Mexico sits at “exercise a high degree of caution,” with specific states carrying stronger warnings. We pull that page up every time, without exception.

Second: has anything changed in the last thirty days? This is where Tina’s industry connections earn their keep. A travel advisor who is actively booking a destination will know things that don’t show up in general media for weeks. The sargassum situation that hammered the Quintana Roo coast a few years back was a perfect example. The beaches looked fine in the promo photos. Our colleagues who’d just visited told a different story. We adjusted accordingly. For more on that particular adventure, the Puerto Morelos post covers it honestly, seaweed and all. See Puerto Morelos: Paradise, Patience, Perseverance.

Third: what’s actually in the news right now, and does it affect tourists directly? This distinction matters. A lot of cartel-related violence in Mexico is territorial, meaning it happens in specific corridors and communities that most tourists never see. That doesn’t make it acceptable or irrelevant, but it does affect how you assess personal risk. The current situation is different because the CJNG response hit urban centres, tourist areas, and transportation infrastructure directly. That’s a different threat profile than a remote state advisory.

What “High Risk” Actually Means for Regular Travellers

Here’s a thing I’ve noticed over years of listening to people talk about travel safety: we’re remarkably bad at calibrating risk. We’ll book a trip to a country under a Level 2 advisory without a second thought, but we’ll read one alarming headline about somewhere we already love and cancel everything. Neither response is particularly rational.

Compare it to driving. Toronto has a higher per-capita violent crime rate than most Mexican beach resorts I’ve visited. Nobody refuses to drive on the 401. But we also don’t drive it blindfolded. We check the weather, we know the road, we have insurance, and we pull over when conditions deteriorate. That’s all we’re asking of ourselves as travellers.

Tina handles the Boarding Pass side of things, which means she is constantly assessing risk for clients, not just for us. The conversations she has in that role have sharpened both of our instincts considerably. When a destination comes up, she’s not asking “is it completely safe?” because no place is completely safe. She’s asking “what are the specific risks, how likely are they to affect a tourist, and what mitigations exist?” That’s a more useful question.

The Dominican Republic taught us this. After every hurricane season there are panicked calls and nervous clients. Yet we’ve had a wonderful time in Punta Cana, as I wrote about here. The Bahamas has had its rough patches too. So has Greece during periods of strike action or political tension. Every destination has a file. You just have to read it.

The Things We Actually Do Before We Book

Beyond the conversation, a few concrete habits have served us well. We register every trip with the Registration of Canadians Abroad through Global Affairs. It takes five minutes and it means someone knows where we are if things go sideways. Most people don’t bother. Most people also don’t have a plan if their airport shuts down.

We buy comprehensive travel insurance, always, before we book anything else. Not after. The timing matters because insurers won’t cover cancellation for risks that were already in the news when you purchased the policy. The people currently stranded in Puerto Vallarta who booked yesterday are learning this lesson in real time.

We tell someone at home exactly where we’re staying, the name of the resort, and our flight details. Not in a morbid way, just practically. Tina is better at this than I am. I tend to think of it as unnecessary admin. She has pointed out, correctly, that it’s actually basic adulting.

And we stay genuinely flexible. This week’s Mexico situation means some travellers are extending stays they didn’t plan to extend. If you can’t absorb that kind of disruption, either financially or emotionally, that’s worth knowing before you book a destination with any elevated risk profile. Flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s part of the travel contract.

A Recommendation Worth Defending

Given everything I’ve just said, here’s where I land on Mexico specifically, and one place in particular that keeps earning our return visits.

El Pesquero, in the town of Puerto Morelos, is a modest seafood spot about a two-minute walk from the town square. The catch comes off boats docked fifty yards away. The fish tacos are the best I’ve had anywhere, and I’ve eaten a lot of fish tacos in service of this blog. My better half ordered the garlic shrimp on our last visit and was quietly emotional about it. The local craft beer selection is excellent. The prices will make you feel guilty for how cheap it is. We were the only tourists in the place. That alone tells you something worth knowing.

The activity I’d pair with it is snorkeling the Puerto Morelos Reef National Park, a marine reserve just offshore accessible by short boat trip from the waterfront. The reef is in genuinely good shape, the guides are professional, and even I, who approach anything involving sea creatures with mild suspicion, had a great time.

Puerto Morelos sits between Cancun and Playa del Carmen, well away from Jalisco and the current trouble. Under normal conditions, it is one of the most sensible Mexico choices for couples who want authenticity over the resort conveyor belt. Whether those conditions hold right now, today, you’ll want to check. That’s the whole point.

The Beer and the Bottom Line

I’ll wrap this up the way we wrap up most of our pre-trip conversations: over a cold one, with the laptop closed, having said the important things out loud.

Mexico is worth it. So is understanding what you’re getting into. The two ideas aren’t in conflict; they’re companions. The best trips we’ve taken were informed decisions, not fearless ones. There is a difference between courage and carelessness, and it roughly corresponds to whether you checked the advisory page before you bought the tickets.

The current situation will settle. It will probably be safe to rebook Puerto Vallarta in a few weeks. The reef will still be there. El Pesquero will still be serving tacos. Tina will still be on her laptop looking at flights, and I will still be the guy who checks the news first and pours himself a beer before answering.

That’s not pessimism. That’s just how we travel.