Seventy Tulum Businesses Closed This Summer, These Twenty Women Say Theirs Did Not

Not one of the 20 Tulum women business owners in the local Amexme chapter has had to close her company, the group's president, Violeta Novelo, said in an interview.

Amexme is the Asociación Mexicana de Mujeres Empresarias, a national organization founded in 1965 that groups more than 6,000 affiliated businesswomen across Mexico and represents the country in the Paris-based federation Femmes Chefs d'Entreprises Mondiales. Novelo leads the Tulum chapter, one of six in Quintana Roo. According to her, no member has come to her asking to resign because the numbers stopped working.

That claim comes at a time when closure has been the dominant business story in the municipality. Municipal inspection officials counted roughly 70 commercial spaces that stopped operating during the low season, out of about 2,850 registered businesses, and the Quintana Roo tourism secretary, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, acknowledged in mid-August that summer hotel occupancy in Tulum had fallen to roughly 15 percent, the lowest level the destination has recorded.

No member has asked to leave the association, Novelo says

Novelo said the chapter has not received a single resignation tied to financial trouble, which she treats as the clearest available measure of how her members are holding up.

"So far we have not had anyone say, I can't do this anymore, I'm leaving the association. No. We keep working together, we keep building alliances among ourselves and with our own members at the state level."

She did not provide figures on revenue, staffing, or debt among affiliated companies, and the association does not publish that data. What she described is the absence of exits, not evidence that the businesses are thriving.

Six chapters in Quintana Roo funnel referrals into Tulum

Amexme operates chapters in Cancún, Puerto Morelos, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, Tulum, and Chetumal. Novelo said the network functions as a referral system: when a member in another chapter or another state needs services for a group of visitors, Tulum affiliates can put forward their own restaurants, hotels, rentals, and tour services.

The mechanism is modest in scale and depends entirely on member volume. It is also one of the few tools available to a small business in a destination where marketing budgets have thinned, and walk-in traffic has collapsed along the beach road.

"We always try to help and support these situations through alliances," Novelo said.

Around 70 storefronts closed while occupancy sank to a record low

The backdrop to the chapter's claim is severe. Data from the Sistema de Información Turística de Quintana Roo show Tulum averaged 69.88 percent hotel occupancy between January and May 2026, down from 76.86 percent in the same months of 2025, a drop nearly five times steeper than the statewide decline.

By July, the picture had worsened. State figures cited that month put sargassum collection along the Mexican Caribbean at more than 83,000 tonnes for the year to date, with the great majority of monitored beaches classified at the highest level of accumulation. Merchants along the coastal corridor reported sales down by as much as 60 percent.

Sergio Canto Contreras, the municipal director general of inspection, attributed some of the closures to seasonality while acknowledging that economic conditions forced owners to close. He singled out rent as the principal obstacle to survival and urged property owners to show flexibility. Business operators interviewed at the time pointed instead to a combination of low liquidity, fewer tourists, and rising operating costs.

Training in finances and taxation for Tulum women business owners

Beyond commercial referrals, the Tulum chapter offers instruction in areas its members have identified as weak points, including finance and tax compliance. Novelo framed the training as a pipeline rather than a service: the objective is to accompany an entrepreneur through the stage at which most small ventures fail and help her build a consolidated company.

"We have a wide range of training, and we support the entrepreneur so she can become the businesswoman she needs to be," she said.

The national organization runs a structured program along the same lines, built around business model definition, financial literacy, process organization, and sales strategy.

Payroll is the reason the doors stay open

Novelo returned repeatedly to a point that has less to do with profit than with obligation. Each business that stays open carries employees, and each employee carries a household.

"We know that behind us there are workers, there are families that need the work. So you fight day by day so you don't reach that point," she said.

That calculation is visible across the sector. Hotels operating far below capacity have cut hiring, some have moved to seasonal operations, and others have temporarily shut down to reduce payroll and electricity costs during the heaviest sargassum weeks.

The chapter's recruitment call stays open at 20 members

The Tulum chapter currently counts 20 affiliated women and has kept its convocatoria open to businesswomen and entrepreneurs who want to join. Recruiting during a contraction is an unusual bet, and the association is making it on the argument that isolation is the more expensive option.

Whether the zero-closure record holds is a question for the next eight weeks. The Tulum hotel association expects demand to stay depressed through the rest of August and September, with recovery beginning in the second half of October. Until then, Novelo says, the chapter's membership list and its 20 open businesses are the same list.

Have alliances with other local businesses helped yours get through Tulum's slow season? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.