Tulum's hoteliers welcome the artists and want the mass events off the coastal strip

David Ortiz Mena expects Tulum hotel occupancy to recover from November. Between now and then, the president of the hotel association is forecasting an atypically low season, driven by fewer airline seats at higher prices.

"There are fewer seats available, and at a higher cost," he said. The shortage is not Tulum's alone, according to Ortiz Mena, who also leads the Consejo Hotelero del Caribe Mexicano. He named Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos as destinations working through the same contraction in air service. His outlook for the close of the year stays positive for Tulum and for the Mexican Caribbean.

September to November is when the town's hotels normally discount rooms and hold payroll together until winter arrives. The discount has less to work with this year, because the flight that carries the guest costs more before anyone quotes a rate. Laundries and transport operators run on the same calendar.

Tulum hotel occupancy runs on seats it no longer has

The shortage has a measurable shape, and it predates the summer. The Consejo Nacional Empresarial Turístico and the STARC unit at Universidad Anáhuac Cancún put the drop in seats to Mexican beach destinations at 3.6 percent against 2025, close to 230,000 fewer seats across June and July. Cancún and Tulum absorbed roughly 216,000 of them, with the arrivals concentrated on international routes, according to figures reported by Por Esto at the end of May.

The federal civil aviation agency recorded the same pattern with a harder edge at the smaller terminal. International passenger traffic slipped at Cancún and fell far more steeply at Tulum, where flights and passengers were down by more than 34 percent for the year through May against 2025.

In mid-August, Ortiz Mena named a cause: the schedules do not show on their own. The bankruptcy of a United States carrier removed close to nine percent of the summer seat supply to the Mexican Caribbean, he told Luces del Siglo, and the price of jet fuel did the rest. He called the combination a perfect storm.

Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos carry the same drop without the sargassum that gets blamed for it here. The Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Turismo Sostenible measured a 16.5 percent fall in traffic at Puerto Vallarta and a 4.2 percent fall at Los Cabos between January and May.

Some of what left is scheduled to return. Municipal, federal and state officials each announced a different count of reactivated international routes at Tulum's airport in early August, and the three numbers never reconciled. Operations begin between late October and December and run through March 2027.

November replaced October in the forecast

Three weeks ago, the same official put the turn earlier.

Speaking in mid-August, Ortiz Mena said August and September would stay adverse and that the recovery would begin in the second half of October. His current forecast moves it into November. Neither he nor the association has explained the change or published a revised projection.

The recovery is being measured against a bad year. Ortiz Mena put the drop at more than 20 percent from May to July compared with the same months a year earlier. On the coastal strip, he cited averages near 15 percent, a floor recorded at certain properties rather than a rate for the municipality. State figures from Situr put the January to May average at 69.88 percent, compared with 76.86 percent over the same five months in 2025.

Some owners answered that by asking whether to open at all in the weak months. We reported in August that hotels on the coastal strip were weighing a seasonal calendar, with no closure announced and no formal decision taken by the association.

A hotel with 54 rooms and no name attached

Against that, Ortiz Mena pointed to something arriving. A recognized brand is developing a hotel on the coastal strip with 54 rooms and a beach club, he said, with a program of activities and appearances by artists. He did not name the brand.

The description matches a project already announced for this coast. UMusic Hotel and Beach Club Tulum is scheduled to open in the first week of December with 57 keys, an 800-capacity beach club, and recording studios, under an alliance of UN Tourism, UMusic Hospitality and Lifestyle, Inmobilia, and Thor Urbana, which we covered when it was announced. The room counts do not match, and neither Ortiz Mena nor the association has confirmed that the two properties are the same.

His argument is about the calendar rather than the building. "Bringing in recognized artists, and above all doing it outside the high season, of course contributes to us as a destination," he said. The months he wants filled that way are the ones he had just finished describing as the weakest.

Mass events, but away from the coastal strip

The endorsement stops at a specific point on the map.

Events on the coastal strip have to be handled with particular care, Ortiz Mena said, because of the area's environmental fragility and the way traffic moves through it. Any event should respect capacity limits, decibel levels, and other applicable rules, and organizers should account for how difficult it already is to circulate through the hotel zone.

Events at a larger scale, in his view, belong in venues built to hold them, and preferably somewhere other than the coast. "Having mass events in the coastal zone can hurt us a lot," he said. "That should be avoided in any case."

The position is older than this season. In January 2025, he publicly asked that electronic music festivals be moved off the coastal strip, arguing that whatever money the events left behind did not settle the question of what else came with them. Tulum counted a little over 10,000 hotel rooms at the time, and he tied the growth of mass events to the spread of vacation rentals around them.

Experience and image, after the seats come back

Occupancy is not the only thing he wants recovered. The main challenge from November onward, in his account, is guaranteeing a good experience for the visitors who do arrive and repairing the image the destination carries in the markets that send them. No airline schedule fixes will fix half the problem.

The two dates he is working with sit close together. The winter routes begin landing between late October and December, and the hotel he described opens in the first week of December. Situr publishes its occupancy reading every week, which puts the first real test of the November forecast in the second half of October, exactly where he had placed the turn a month ago.

If the seats come back in November, does Tulum's low season end with them, or is something else keeping the rooms empty? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.