Tulum is sinking while the state does nothing

Tulum's fifth councilman says he wants no candidacy in 2027. He wants an opposition bloc instead, built on the argument that the Tulum tourism crisis is now a government failure.

Eugenio Barbachano Losa, who joined the Partido Acción Nacional recently and sits on a council led by Morena mayor Diego Castañón Trejo, told the outlet Grupo Animal that the electoral calendar matters less than the condition of the industry that pays for everything else in the municipality. What he says he is building is a single opposition front that treats the downturn as an emergency rather than a talking point.

"If there is no urgent change of course before the elections, the outlook gets worse."

The timing is what gives the statement weight. Tulum's high season opens at the end of October, and the two competing descriptions of this town, a collapse or a slow stretch of low season, will be measured against the same winter. Most of the figures the councilman reaches for are public. Some of them say something slightly different from what he says they say.

Barbachano counts 150 layoffs at a single supermarket

His inventory of the damage is specific. A large supermarket in Tulum has let 150 employees go, he said. Two international coffee chains have closed branches, one inside Parque del Jaguar and one in the coastal zone. Dozens of restaurants, hotels and tourist complexes have shut for good.

He named neither the supermarket nor the chains, and The Tulum Times found no independent confirmation of the 150 figure in public records or regional reporting. That count is his.

The pattern around it is documented. About 60 workers at Parque del Jaguar lost their jobs on July 1 and 2 after Grupo Mundo Maya declined to renew contracts that had expired the day before, a round of cuts this newspaper reported at the time, and the employees involved had already been moved from three-month agreements onto one-month ones.

He graded the years as he went. Bad in 2024, critical in 2025, and worse than either in the season now starting. He has made the case before from the same chamber, telling the council last year that the federal megaprojects were not delivering what Tulum was promised.

Seven airlines out, three Canadian carriers back on October 24

The airline list he gave is close to accurate, with one correction.

Aeroméxico flew its last flight at the Felipe Carrillo Puerto airport on September 30 and has nothing scheduled there until August 2027. Volaris stops on January 7 and tied the decision to low load factors, the non-resident fee, higher airport use charges, fuel, and air navigation costs. Avianca dropped Bogotá, Copa dropped Panama City, JetBlue dropped New York JFK, and Discover Airlines and Volaris Costa Rica pulled out as well, which brings the count the national press has settled on to seven.

American Airlines, which appears on his list of departures, did not leave. Industry reporting places it with Delta and United among the carriers that trimmed or shifted capacity toward Cancún.

The traffic behind those decisions is not in dispute. The airport moved 471,500 passengers between January and June, 33.2 percent fewer than in the same half of 2025, with international traffic down 40.8 percent.

The terminal's operator keeps a different calendar. Grupo Aeroportuario Mundo Maya says the airport is operating normally and that Air Canada, WestJet and Air Transat will resume seasonal service on October 24 and maintain it through March, with a projected 710 international operations. It also expects the three US carriers still flying to raise their international operations from 552 to 1,064 between November and March. President Claudia Sheinbaum, asked about the exits on October 8, rejected insecurity as the cause, and Mexicana's director said the state airline will add winter frequencies.

The seat numbers behind the Tulum tourism crisis

Half a million seats is the figure doing the most work in his argument, and it needs to be translated.

Barbachano described a report of half a million airline seats left unsold for the coming vacation season. The published projections describe seats that will never be offered. The Consejo Hotelero del Caribe Mexicano estimates 800,000 fewer seats into the Mexican Caribbean between September and December, a 17 percent cut, and roughly 500,000 fewer between January and April 2027. STARC, the tourism research center at Anáhuac Cancún, puts the United States reduction for the last quarter of this year at 435,000 seats and 2,600 flights. Spirit alone accounts for 198,880 of them after ending service to the region.

Unsold inventory and withdrawn capacity are not the same problem, and the second is the harder one. It removes the late booking before anyone can decide not to make it.

Some of the movement runs in the opposite direction. Canadian capacity between October and December rises by 66,351 seats, and domestic seats into Cancún, Cozumel and Tulum edge up 0.7 percent even as the flights carrying them fall 4.1 percent.

From 861 pesos to 1,158 for every foreign arrival

The Derecho de No Residente is the piece Barbachano says nobody in state government will touch. It stood at 861 pesos in 2025 and 983 this year. The 2027 economic package proposed 1,334.80, a 35.8 percent jump, which the Consejo Hotelero measured as close to 55 percent over two years, before asking the federal government and Congress to reconsider. The version approved by the deputies landed lower, at 1,158 pesos, with a separate 10 percent rise in airspace use rights moving alongside it.

His claim of silence holds for the state tourism secretary. It does not hold for the Senate. Mayuli Latifa Martínez, a PAN senator for Quintana Roo and now a party colleague, called the increase Morena's petty cash on October 11 and warned it would cost hotel occupancy and jobs.

Bernardo Cueto Riestra, the state tourism secretary, has spoken about Tulum, just not about the fee. He has said the sector cannot describe what is happening here as a crisis, calling it a low season instead. Federal tourism secretary Josefina Rodríguez has taken the same line, putting occupancy near 50 percent and pointing to the end of October for the recovery.

People are leaving, the councilman says

The last part of his warning is the hardest to check and the most serious if he is right. Tulum has begun to register an exodus of residents and a gradual displacement, he said, and he linked a possible rise in insecurity to unemployment in the municipality. He offered no figures for either, and none were published with his remarks.

Between October 24 and January 7, the same airport gains three seasonal carriers and loses a Mexican one. The high season that opens at the end of this month is the test both readings of Tulum have agreed to take, and the fee the deputies approved still has to pass the Senate before it reaches a single ticket.

Is what Tulum is living through this month a tourism crisis or an ordinary low season, and who should be answering for it? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.