More than 300 taxi drivers, tourist police officers, and service providers passed through a Tulum tourism training program that ended this week, as the state tourism secretary put local hotel occupancy at 15%.
The Quintana Roo tourism ministry, Sedetur, coordinated the program under the name Marketing Turístico para Tulum. It ran as two conferences and one workshop, opened at the Hotel Akumal Bay Beach and Wellness in Akumal, and closed in the meeting hall of the Tiburones del Caribe taxi union in Tulum.
The timing gives those sessions a weight they would not have carried a year ago. Tulum's hotels are emptier than at any point the state has on record, and the quality of a taxi ride or a police interaction is one of the few variables the people in that room control. The sargassum is not. Neither are airline schedules.
Tulum tourism training closed inside the taxi union hall
Sedetur put attendance at more than 300 people from the public and private sectors. Its account of the sessions names Manuel Enrique Solís Alcocer, secretary general of the Tiburones del Caribe taxi union, Enrique Rodríguez Luna, executive director of the Tulum Hotel Association, and Haydee Desirée Hernández Pastrana, director general of tourism for the Tulum municipal government. Local reports of the closing session also placed Manuel Moreno Rivas, an adviser to the state Citizen Security Ministry, among those present.
For most visitors, a taxi driver is the first resident they speak to. Arrivals at Felipe Carrillo Puerto International Airport reach the town by road, as do the ones who fly into Cancún, and the ride is where a first impression of Tulum gets made or lost. The program ended in the drivers' own hall.
What González Rubiera told the room
Sergio González Rubiera delivered the two conferences and the workshop. He runs the Cancún consultancy Acti Consultores and serves as national president of the Mexican Association of Receptive Tourism Agencies, AMATUR. Sedetur said his material covered how quality is defined in tourism, the management of visitors' emotions, added value and what it returns to a business, tourism marketing, current promotion trends, and the communication tools destinations use to stay visible.
The lead conference borrowed its title from one of his books, Calidad en el Servicio Turístico y Gestión de las Emociones.
Occupancy at 15%
This week, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, the state tourism secretary, said Tulum's hotel occupancy stands at roughly 15%, the lowest in the destination's history, while Playa del Carmen is at about 30%. He tied the fall to an atypical sargassum season and to airlines cutting frequencies into the Mexican Caribbean as fuel costs climb.
The figure needs reading carefully. Sedetur's own summer report put Quintana Roo as a whole near 67%, and Cueto, in remarks published days earlier, described hotels in Tulum and Playa del Carmen running below 50%. 24 Horas Quintana Roo reported that the coastal strip in Tulum has reached a 15% occupancy rate, a level that covers neither payroll nor the cost of clearing sargassum from the sand.
The longer series moves the same way. Tulum averaged 69.88% occupancy from January through May, against 76.86% in the same months of 2025, according to the Quintana Roo tourism information system. The statewide average slipped 1.42 points across that stretch. Tulum gave up close to seven.
The damage does not stop at the front desk. Around each hotel sits a chain of reception staff, cleaners, maintenance crews, kitchen workers, drivers, restaurants, and tour operators, and Tulum draws many of those workers from towns along the highway, which spreads a weak season well past the municipal line.
Hotel operators quoted by the same outlet said they are weighing seasonal operation and temporary closures.
Solís Alcocer wants more courses for his drivers
Solís Alcocer said training operators is one of the steps needed to improve both the transport service and the treatment of people arriving in town, and that the union will keep organizing this kind of preparation for its members. He described it as professionalization aimed at what the passenger actually experiences.
Participants agreed on the need for tighter coordination among authorities, service providers, and tourism organizations, particularly regarding visitor attention and problem resolution as they arise.
Cueto, in the statement issued by Sedetur, said that reinforcing the abilities of workers in direct contact with visitors is central to building quality experiences, and situated the Tulum sessions within a broader state effort in training and promotion.
The same conference ran in Cancún first
Tulum is a stop on a circuit rather than a one-off. AMATUR's public record of the program shows the same conference given to tourist police from Mexican Caribbean destinations in Cancún in August and October of 2025, with support from the Universidad Tecnológica de Cancún, and to customs officers at Cancún International Airport in January 2025. Governor Mara Lezama presided over the closing ceremony for that customs group the following month.
No date has been set for another session in Tulum. Solís Alcocer said the union will continue to put its drivers through the courses. At 15% occupancy, those drivers have far fewer passengers to practice on than they had a year ago.
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