Quintana Roo's tourism secretariat is courting airlines to restore Tulum airport flights to Panama, Colombia, Canada and the United States, after most international service at the terminal vanished this year.
Tourism Secretary Bernardo Cueto Riestra met with Colonel Marcos Martínez Amparán, the administrator of Tulum International Airport, and his team to review conditions at the terminal and identify ways to increase visitor traffic. Haydee Hernández Pastrana, the state tourism director, said the meeting also dealt with recovering the routes that once linked Tulum to Panama and Colombia.
The gap they are trying to close is wide. International operations at the airport fell from 446 in January to 181 in May, a drop of 59 percent, and by early August, the terminal's international service was down to four routes, all to cities in the United States. The building was designed to move 5.5 million passengers a year.
Cueto's team leans on incentives to reopen airline talks
Officials said they are coordinating with municipal and airport authorities and opening contacts with carriers through incentive programs meant to make the lost routes commercially attractive again.
"They are already working on strong incentives to hold meetings with airlines through Mundo Maya and bring the flights back," Hernández said.
The coordination spans four offices: the state tourism secretariat, the municipal tourism directorate, the Tulum municipal government, and the airport administration. Cueto has described the terminal as strategic infrastructure for tourism development in southern Quintana Roo, a stretch of the state with no other air gateway.
Tulum airport flights fell 59 percent between January and May
The terminal handled more than 366,000 passengers in the first five months of the year. International passenger traffic dropped 34 percent in the first quarter. Domestic traffic fell around 25 percent over the same stretch.
Hotels felt it. Average occupancy in Tulum sat at 48.8 percent in late June, near the bottom of the low season and well short of what the town's room inventory was built to fill.
State officials have argued that the retreat is not particular to Quintana Roo, describing the cuts in routes and frequencies as a global adjustment in the airline industry. That framing does not change the arithmetic for the workers who service the terminal, the taxi and van operators who wait outside it, or the hotels along the coastal road that priced their year on a busier airport.
Four routes left where twelve once flew
Tulum International Airport opened on December 1, 2023, and built up to twelve international routes during 2024. By this summer, the list had shrunk to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.
The two markets Hernández named are among the losses. Copa Airlines connected the terminal to Panama City. Avianca flew it to Bogotá. Neither is flying to Tulum now.
The domestic side has held up better, with service to Mexico City, the Felipe Ángeles International Airport, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. For most foreign visitors, though, the practical entry point to Tulum is still Cancún, roughly two hours north by road, which is exactly the habit the state is trying to break.
Newark and four Canadian cities on the winter list
Hernández said the group also discussed reactivating winter routes from Canada and the United States, including a connection to Newark, the New Jersey airport serving the New York metropolitan area, as well as other international routes planned for the coming season.
Canadian traffic is the piece with the clearest seasonal logic. Snowbird demand from Quebec, Ontario and Alberta builds starting in November, and charter and leisure carriers set those schedules months before the first flight boards.
"Good things are coming for the airport and the destination," Hernández said.
Nine routes promised, no airlines named
On August 6, federal Tourism Secretary Josefina Rodríguez Zamora stood at the Tulum terminal and announced that nine routes would return, five of them international, naming Quebec, Toronto, Calgary, Montreal and New Jersey.
She did not identify the airlines that would operate them, and no start dates were given. The state announcement that followed has not added either detail.
The winter season opens in December. Until a carrier loads a Tulum route into its published schedule, the nine routes are a target rather than a timetable, and the meetings held this month will be measured by what shows up in the booking systems this fall.
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