December must pay for the summer Tulum lost, and bookings already say 85 percent

Confirmed reservations put Tulum hotel occupancy at 50 to 55 percent in September and 80 to 85 percent across November and December, according to Claudio Cortés Méndez, the CROC's commissioner in Tulum.

Cortés Méndez, who represents hotel and restaurant workers in the municipality for the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos, said October should run above 60 percent. The percentages correspond to reservations establishments have already confirmed, he specified, not to sales the sector still hopes to make.

The projection matters because of what it follows. Quintana Roo's tourism secretary, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, said in mid-August that Tulum had spent the summer at 15 percent occupancy, the lowest figure in the destination's history, with Playa del Carmen at 30 percent. Whether the winter arrives on the schedule those reservations describe will decide whether hotels that survived that stretch keep their payrolls whole.

The numbers hotels report having on the books

September could see spikes as high as 60 percent, Cortés Méndez said, and if the trend holds, Tulum would reach the winter season at levels close to those of previous years.

"Most of the hotels are already reporting the occupancy they have projected from confirmed reservations. For October we are talking above 60 percent, and for November and December, 80, 85 percent so far in the bookings," he said, speaking in Spanish.

He drew the contrast himself. Going into the summer, the sector expected occupancy above 60 percent and, in the more optimistic readings, 70 to 80 percent, the range Tulum had posted in earlier years. September and October, traditionally the slowest months on this coast, now look better than that summer did, with a trend that could place them between 55 and 60 percent.

A summer the state called the worst on record

Cueto Riestra attributed the collapse to two forces. Sargassum arrived on Quintana Roo beaches in atypical volumes through the season, and airlines cut frequencies into the Mexican Caribbean as fuel costs climbed. He described the result as a warning for the sector, given what the drop in visitors was doing to hotels and to every service that lives off them.

Where the summer figures diverge

The 15 percent reading is not the only one in circulation, and the gap between the available numbers is worth naming. Weekly state tourism data placed Tulum at 41.5 percent in mid-July, the lowest among Quintana Roo destinations along with Costa Maya at 31.9 percent, while Cozumel sat at 54.3 percent and the Riviera Maya at 54.1 percent.

The two figures measure different things. Municipal averages fold in hotels across the town and the coastal strip, while the sharpest lows have been concentrated in the beach zone and in European plan properties, which reported 15 to 20 percent through June. All-inclusive hotels did not clear 40 percent in the same month. Any single-occupancy percentage for Tulum depends heavily on which hotels are counted.

Tulum hotel occupancy fell nearly five times faster than the state average

The longer series makes the shape of the year clearer. Figures from the Sistema de Información Turística de Quintana Roo show Tulum averaged 69.88 percent occupancy between January and May 2026, compared with 76.86 percent in the same five months of 2025. That is a loss of 6.98 percentage points.

Across the state, the average moved from 77.12 percent to 75.70 percent, a decline of 1.42 points. Cancún gave up half a point. Playa del Carmen lost 3.30, the Riviera Maya lost 2.14, and Costa Mujeres lost 5.40.

Tulum's fall was steeper than all of them.

Sargassum removal can reach 500,000 pesos a week per hotel

Hotel operators have put the cost of clearing sargassum at up to 500,000 pesos per property per week, an expense that does not scale with occupancy. Payroll, electricity, maintenance, and security behave the same way.

Faced with that arithmetic, the Asociación de Hoteles de Tulum asked the federal government to open support schemes with commercial and development banks to restructure credit. David Ortiz Mena, who presides over both that association and the Consejo Hotelero del Caribe Mexicano, has said that some establishments have already closed, and others are considering operating seasonally, pausing during months that no longer pay for themselves.

Sixty percent is the line Cortés Méndez himself has drawn

The September projection sits below a threshold the same union leader named in public last year. In October 2025, discussing the winter ahead, he said that 60 percent occupancy is enough to preserve a hotel's full workforce, and that hotels were sustaining operations with all-inclusive packages priced between 1,600 and 1,800 pesos per person, roughly half the rates of earlier seasons.

Measured against that line, the September range falls short. October is the first month the projection clears it.

There is a second comparison available. In November 2025, Cortés Méndez described September and October of that year as running near 40 percent, then recovering to 60 to 75 percent by late November. If this year's confirmed bookings hold, the two slowest months would land above where he placed them a year ago.

Free entry to Parque del Jaguar and a 20 peso electric shuttle

Cortés Méndez credited the measures taken to ease access and movement inside Parque del Jaguar with improving conditions for visitors.

Those measures were published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on July 17, when President Claudia Sheinbaum presented Plan Tulum Renace from Tulum itself. Entry to the park became free. The archaeological zone and the protected natural area moved to a single fee of 80 pesos for Mexican visitors, free on Sundays, and 265 pesos for foreign visitors, a return to rates last seen in 2018 and 2019. The internal electric transport, operated by Grupo Mundo Maya, dropped to 20 pesos, matching the fare charged by the old tourist train.

The plan runs to 10 strategic points, among them a parking structure at the south access, a professionalization and certification program for tourism service providers, a National Guard model for visitor assistance, and a new public transport system for the town.

No published visitor count yet isolates what those changes have done to arrivals. What exists so far is the reading of the people selling rooms.

Restaurants and shops on the main avenue are still waiting

More movement is visible in town, Cortés Méndez said, and he expressed confidence that the rise in national and foreign travelers will reach restaurants, shops, and small hotels along the main avenue, the businesses that depend most directly on foot traffic and have the least room to wait.

That sector spent August receiving mixed signals. Eight Tulum restaurants collected MICHELIN Guide plaques on August 28, more than any other municipality in Quintana Roo. Two weeks earlier, the local representative of the national restaurant chamber said establishments in the town had been closing because sales were not covering operating costs.

The hotel association has put the start of the recovery in the first half of October. Every number Cortés Méndez cited carries the same condition he himself attached to it: that the reservations already on the books stay there.

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