Tulum hotel occupancy on the coastal strip is averaging about 15%, according to hotel association president David Ortiz Mena, who says operators will seek bank financing from state and federal authorities.
Some properties have already closed. Others are weighing whether to open only during the high season and remain closed during the months when rooms do not sell.
Ortiz Mena, who presides over both the Tulum Hotel Association and the Mexican Caribbean Hotel Council, said the figures recorded in May and June are not enough to cover payroll and operating expenses, and that clearing sargassum from a single beachfront can run to 500,000 pesos a week. What the sector wants from government is access to support schemes through commercial banks and development banking, built around restructuring the credit hotels already carry.
Tulum hotel occupancy stopped covering payroll in May
How deep the fall goes depends on which hotels are counted. Ortiz Mena has put coastal-zone occupancy at roughly 15% and described May and June as more than 20% below the same months of 2024. Other accounts from the same round of interviews place May, June, and July closer to 20% overall, with European Plan and all-inclusive properties in the coastal zone and downtown reporting no more than 40%.
The direction is the same in every version, and so is the consequence. A hotel selling two rooms out of 10 still pays the same electricity, the same water deliveries, the same security shifts, and the same staff.
"It is difficult to have low occupancy and face the costs of sargassum removal," Ortiz Mena said, speaking in Spanish at the annual meeting of the Caribbean Business Coordinating Council.
500,000 pesos a week
The sargassum bill is the newer half of the problem. Quintana Roo is working through its heaviest season on record. The Navy has reported more than 96,000 tons collected statewide so far in 2026, already above the roughly 92,800 tons gathered in all of 2025, and state environment secretary Óscar Rébora has said the largest arrivals land in August, September, and October.
Tulum carries a heavy share of it. Municipal crews under the local Zofemat office had pulled more than 2,800 tons off the town's beaches by mid-July, close to double the same stretch last year. Hotels clean their own frontages with private crews on top of that public operation.
At 500,000 pesos a week, a single property spends roughly two million pesos a month moving algae off sand that, at current occupancy, most of its rooms are not paying for.
Ortiz Mena asks the development banks to restructure
The proposal is narrower than a rescue. Hoteliers want federal and state authorities to open financing schemes with commercial banks and development banks, aimed at restructuring existing debt rather than direct subsidies, and Ortiz Mena said the idea has already been raised at both levels of government.
He framed the purpose as holding payroll through the low season and keeping beach cleaning running into the winter, when the sector expects rooms to fill again. Seasonal operation, the alternative currently on the table at several hotels, shifts that cost onto the people who clean, cook, and staff the front desks year-round.
No response to the financing request has been announced publicly.
The 9% of seats that never arrived
Air connectivity took its own bite this year. Ortiz Mena attributes close to 9% of the destination's lost seat supply to the bankruptcy of one airline, compounded by high jet fuel costs.
The independent measurements are larger. A study by Universidad Anáhuac Cancún, in collaboration with the Sustainable Tourism Advanced Research Center, found 561,311 fewer seats from the United States to Cancún, Cozumel, and Tulum for July and August, 22.5% below 2025 levels, with the exit of Spirit Airlines accounting for 195,138 of them. Cancún absorbed the largest share of that contraction, but Tulum's airport depends on the same carriers and routes.
Ortiz Mena also pointed to the World Cup, which he said changed traveler behavior through June and July.
About 4,500 rental listings, and a complaint about who pays
The other pressure comes from inside the municipality. Ortiz Mena counts more than 4,500 vacation rental units in Tulum, compared with roughly 6,000 registrations in Cancún and some 800 in Puerto Morelos, a ratio he considers disproportionate for a town of Tulum's size.
His objection is fiscal and environmental rather than competitive. Rentals operating outside regulation, he argues, contribute nothing to environmental sanitation or to sargassum removal while selling access to the same coastline hotels are paying to clean.
"We even see vacation rental supply in irregular areas," he said, referring to informal settlements on the edges of town.
October is when the sector expects the turn
August and September are not expected to improve. The sector's own projection puts the start of recovery in October, and Ortiz Mena said the current pace of winter reservations is ahead of the previous cycle, which would put the season above 2025 levels.
That forecast is exactly what the financing request is meant to bridge. A hotel that closes now has to be staffed, supplied, and cleaned again before the first winter arrivals, and the gap between an empty August and a solid December falls entirely on properties that spent the summer selling one room in seven.
Neither the state nor the federal government has said whether the credit schemes will open. The state environment secretariat expects the heaviest sargassum arrivals in the weeks ahead, and through October, the same month the hotel sector has marked for its recovery.
Should public development banks help Tulum hotels through a bad season, or is seasonal closing simply the market correcting itself? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.