Why do so many people travel to Mexico, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and Ethiopia despite safety concerns?

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I've been to over 40 countries including many of the "dangerous" once and only once ran into a "mildly dangerous" situation. As long as you do a little bit of homework and keep aware of your surroundings you can safely travel to most places.

The homicide metric isn't particularly useful. Homicides are quite rare (even in high rate countries) and often concentrated in certain locations and related to gang violence. As long as you stay out of these locations and don't join a gang, you'll be fine. In this regard, travelling to different countries isn't much different than moving about at home.

You are much more likely to encounter small crimes that are specifically targeted at tourists: mainly pick pocketing, theft, scams of all sorts, mugging, etc. You can find those in all countries to varying degrees but certainly in "safe" countries as well.

Again, with a little bit of preparation and attention these can easily be avoided.

Why do so many people travel to Mexico, South Africa, Puerto Rico, and Ethiopia despite safety concerns?

As explained above, safety concerns can easily be dealt with. People choose countries based on all sorts of criteria: ease of travel, difficulty of visa/entry, natural beauty, religious compatibility, human rights, culturally interesting, friends & family, work, value of the money, etc. Many Americans go to Mexico since it's close by, very diverse with a lots of great locations, many of have friends & family there, and it's relatively inexpensive.

If security is not an issue for tourists, why don't they travel to, say, Pakistan?

Many people do visit Pakistan. It's surprisingly difficult to find data on this and the pandemic has skewed the number anyway, but according to Wikipedia 6.6M people visited Pakistan in 2018, which is significant.

A lot of this is probably perception: for most people the first thing that comes to mind when they hear "Pakistan" isn't "this is a great holiday destination". Many countries market themselves aggressively as tourist destinations. A good example is free stopovers (Iceland, Portugal, UAE, Qatar). Apparently Pakistan isn't doing a lot of marketing, at least I haven't encountered any.

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