A direct flight from Chile to Tulum, proposed without a date

A direct flight from Chile to Tulum came up during a meeting between the town's tourism director and Chile's ambassador to Mexico. No airline flies that route today, and the meeting produced no date.

Haydee Hernández Pastrana, director general of tourism for the ninth municipality, sat down with Ambassador Francisco Javier Chahuán Chahuán and consul Daniel Navarro, according to an account published Sunday by La Jornada Maya. She presented the destination's tourism offer and handed over information and promotional material. The municipality has not said where the meeting took place or on which day.

The request arrives in a season when Tulum's airport has almost nothing to show a South American traveler. Its winter schedule opens on October 25 and closes on March 27, and the nine international destinations on it sit entirely in the United States and Canada.

The direct flight from Chile to Tulum has no carrier and no date

Hernández Pastrana framed the route as a possibility for the near or medium term. Her account names no airline and sets no target season, and no carrier on either side has said publicly that it is studying the market.

Chile does have a nonstop to this coast. It lands in Cancún, roughly two hours north of Tulum by road, and according to schedule data compiled by FlightConnections, it runs once a week, an eight-hour fifteen-minute leg of 6,284 kilometers operated by LATAM out of Santiago.

The winter map that Bernardo Cueto, Quintana Roo's tourism secretary, gave to Reportur on September 3 lists ten airlines and thirteen destinations at Felipe Carrillo Puerto International between October 25 and March 27. Nine are international: Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Newark, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta and Houston. The rest are domestic.

Every city on that list is in North America.

That map is already a recovery. The airport moved 34 percent fewer international passengers in the first quarter of 2026 than in the same quarter of 2025, with its international network down from 12 cities to 4. The routes returning this winter are seasonal, most of them weekly, and they end in the spring.

Viña del Mar is the ambassador's home city

The second item raised at the meeting was a promotional alliance with Viña del Mar, based on an exchange of materials and joint promotional action between the two cities.

Chahuán was born there in 1971. He represented the district covering Viña del Mar and Concón in Chile's Chamber of Deputies from 2006 to 2010, then held a seat in the Senate for the Valparaíso Region until March of this year. President José Antonio Kast designated him ambassador to Mexico on May 26.

Viña del Mar also hosts Latin America's best-known song festival every February, the kind of fixed calendar asset a promotional exchange usually runs on. And the pairing is the cheapest thing to come out of the meeting. Trading brochures commits neither city to an aircraft.

Cobá, the cenotes and a Maya identity, handed over on paper

What Tulum presented to the delegation was its established catalog. The archaeological zones of Tulum and Cobá. The cenotes and the lagoons. The hotel inventory. Hernández Pastrana said the municipality wants to promote the Maya identity that distinguishes it, as well as its natural and cultural attractions.

The infrastructure argument is the newer one, and the town leaned on it: the Maya Train, the airport itself, and Parque Nacional del Jaguar.

Chile is absent from Quintana Roo's own list of source markets

When the state government named the countries sending visitors to Quintana Roo in a July 2025 statement, the list ran to the United States, Canada, Colombia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Brazil and Argentina. Chile did not appear on it.

That absence is both the argument for the meeting and the obstacle facing it. A market that does not travel here in volume is the kind of evidence route planners want before committing an aircraft, and evidence is the one thing a destination without a route cannot produce.

Tulum's hotels are in no position to wait comfortably. The state tourism information system put municipal occupancy at 45 percent for the week of September 5 to 11. David Ortiz Mena, president of the Tulum hotel association, said on September 10 that his beach members had been running under 20 percent since May, roughly ten points below last year.

Hernández Pastrana has held the job for five months. Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo appointed her on April 18, replacing Carla Andrade Piedras in a restructuring that official information attributed to a shortfall from what the administration expected. In June, her office hosted travel agency representatives from the AMAV in Tulum, on the same commercial logic.

Neither the municipality nor the embassy has announced a follow-up meeting, a working group, or a date for the route or the Viña del Mar agreement. The schedule that opens on October 25 runs until March 27, and every aircraft on it arrives from the United States, Canada, or elsewhere in Mexico.

Would a direct flight from Santiago change how South American travelers reach Tulum, or is Cancún close enough? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.