Three fees, one window, and a booth INAH no longer runs

The INAH stopped printing and selling its own tickets at the Tulum archaeological zone on Monday, and entry fees are now collected at windows run by Grupo Mundo Maya, a Defense Ministry company.

The change arrived in a letter, not a press release. Margarito Molina Rendón, director of the Centro INAH Quintana Roo, told the site's staff that the institute's booth would stop issuing tickets that day.

Tulum is the third most visited archaeological site in Mexico, behind Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán, and about a million people a year pass through its gate. Who sells that ticket decides who counts the money, and the national union representing culture workers says the current answer breaks the law.

The letter that shut the camper booth

The document is numbered 401.50.7-2026/888. Molina Rendón addressed it to José Manuel Ochoa Rodríguez, who is responsible for the Tulum archaeological zone, and to José Elías Caamal Pool and Isauro Tuyub Mex, the site's technical coordinators.

It told them that the printing and sale of electronic tickets carried out by the INAH at the camper booth was suspended as of Monday, July 27. The institute would keep selling tickets, the letter said, but only at Grupo Mundo Maya windows. Staff involved in running the site were instructed to apply the unified fee set by a presidential decree published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on July 17, charging Mexican and foreign visitors alike through the company's points of sale.

What 80 pesos now covers at the Tulum archaeological zone

That decree, in force since July 20 and valid through the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years, rewrote the arithmetic of the visit as part of the federal Plan Tulum Renace.

• Mexican visitors enter Parque del Jaguar free. Foreign visitors pay 100 pesos.
• A single unified payment covers Parque Nacional Tulum and the archaeological zone: 80 pesos for Mexicans, Monday through Saturday, and 165 pesos for foreigners.
• Residents of the municipality of Tulum are exempt from those fees.
• On Sundays, Mexicans and foreign residents of Mexico enter the archaeological zone free.
• Minors, seniors, students, teachers, pensioners, people with disabilities, and accredited guides keep their exemptions.

A foreign visitor doing the full circuit pays 265 pesos, the figure the federal government highlighted when President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the plan in Tulum on July 17. She described the 80 peso national rate as a return to what the site charged in 2018 and 2019.

Dzul Tuyub wants it revoked

José Enrique Vidal Dzul Tuyub, secretary general of the Sindicato Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Secretaría de Cultura, argues that archaeological property belongs to the nation and that its administration falls to the INAH alone, under the Constitution and the federal law on monuments and archaeological, artistic, and historic zones.

"What we are seeing is a silent privatization of cultural heritage," he said, questioning how legal certainty can be granted to a company with no clear transparency mechanism over ticket revenue. The remarks were made in Spanish and translated by The Tulum Times.

In a written statement circulated on social media, the union went further, saying that under the cover of rescue and modernization the management of archaeological zones is being handed to commercial interests, and that sites of this kind are not theme parks subordinate to financial returns.

Dzul Tuyub also separated the price cut from the handover. Lowering fees or extending tax incentives, he said, has nothing to do with transferring the operation to a state company. He accused the INAH's Quintana Roo office of failing to honor commitments made to workers, among them the installation of booths run directly by the institute.

The union has put numbers behind the argument. Dzul Tuyub said last year that Tulum received more than 1.1 million visitors in 2024 and generated as much as 350 million pesos in annual ticket income, money he argued should return to restoration and research at the site. He put the INAH's national budget at a little over three billion pesos a year to cover 187 archaeological zones, one paleontological site, and 126 museums.

Workers at the site protested the same arrangement in August 2025

This is the second round. On August 13, 2025, unionized INAH staff demonstrated inside the walled city and accused the same company, then still known by its GAFSACOMM initials, of usurping the institute's functions by charging admission at the Parque del Jaguar gate.

The Secretaría de Cultura and the INAH replied that an agreement signed with Conanp and the company allowed combined tickets to be sold from August 10, 2025, and that the tickets offered at the park window had been purchased from the INAH beforehand, so no function had been displaced. Workers at that protest also said the institute's free-entry categories were not being respected at the company's counter. What changed this week is that the institute's own booth stopped issuing tickets altogether.

A meeting request aimed at reversing the order

Dzul Tuyub said he will seek meetings with Joel Omar Vázquez Herrera, the INAH's director general, and Anna Goycoolea Artís, national coordinator of INAH centers, to ask for the measure to be revoked and to present the union's legal case. As of his statement, he said, federal authorities had issued no official position on the complaints.

Nothing in Molina Rendón's letter describes the arrangement as temporary, and it sets no date for review. Until the institute's national office answers the union, the camper booth stays closed and the line at Tulum forms in front of a window the INAH does not operate.

Should the INAH sell its own tickets at Tulum, or does one unified window serve visitors better? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.