Winter gives Tulum airport 13 destinations

Tulum airport flights will reach 13 destinations operated by 10 airlines between October 25 and March 27, according to Quintana Roo tourism secretary Bernardo Cueto, who detailed the schedule to the trade outlet Reportur.

Nine of those destinations sit outside Mexico, and four inside it. The list arrives at a terminal that has been shedding both kinds of traffic since January.

International passenger volume at the Felipe Carrillo Puerto airport fell 34 percent in the first quarter of the year, and the town it was built to serve spent the summer at 15 percent hotel occupancy, the lowest reading in its history. The winter program is the state's answer to that. What it cannot do on its own is put people in seats.

Nine international destinations, and four inside Mexico

Cueto's list covers Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in Canada, and Newark, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, and Houston in the United States. The four domestic routes connect Tulum with Mexico City, the Felipe Ángeles airport north of the capital, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. Governor Mara Lezama has given the same headline count in public: 13 routes flown by 10 carriers.

Four of those carriers have names attached to them. Haydee Hernández Pastrana, Tulum's director of tourism, said in early August that United Airlines, Air Canada, Air Transat, and WestJet had confirmed a return to the terminal with direct service to Newark, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, and Calgary. She placed the first operations between late October and December, running through March 2027, and described the routes as a vote of confidence from the airlines.

The other six airlines have not been publicly identified, and no weekly frequency counts have been released for any of the 13 routes.

Sectur counted nine routes; the city counted eight

The announcement reached the public in three versions that do not agree.

Federal tourism secretary Josefina Rodríguez Zamora presented the return of nine international routes. Hernández Pastrana's office described eight international routes reactivated. Lezama's version included nine international destinations in a package of 13, operated by 10 airlines.

Part of the gap is arithmetic rather than disagreement. Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Miami were already flying this spring, when The Tulum Times reported that those four were the only international routes the airport still had. Counting them as part of a recovery folds routes that never stopped into the same total as the five that did.

The traffic Tulum airport flights are meant to win back

Figures from the Federal Civil Aviation Agency and the airport administration show roughly 366,000 passengers moving through the terminal between January and April. International travelers accounted for 178,000 of them, more than 90,000 fewer than in the same months of 2025. Domestic traffic fell 25 percent over the same window.

The route map thinned faster than the passenger count. Tulum held connections to 12 international destinations in 2024. Avianca, Copa Airlines, JetBlue, and Volaris Costa Rica suspended their operations, citing demand below expectations, and the links to John F. Kennedy and Newark went with them. Daily international departures dropped from 10 to three.

The state government has attributed the contraction to a global airline trend rather than to anything specific about the destination, and has spent months asking the suspended carriers to return. Cueto himself offered a narrower account in August, citing sargassum volumes on Quintana Roo beaches and carriers cutting service in the Mexican Caribbean as fuel costs climbed.

July already ran this experiment

The winter schedule is the second attempt this year to fix demand with supply.

In June, the Fideicomiso de Promoción Turística y Desarrollo Económico de Tulum signed an agreement with Mexicana de Aviación. Mario Cruz, who presides over the trust, said the airline's director general, Leobardo Ávila, had confirmed eight additional flights for the summer, scheduled for July 18, 22, 23, and 25, and for August 1, 8, 15, and 19. Those were extra frequencies rather than new routes, sold alongside vacation packages at preferential rates backed by more than 75 hotels, restaurants, parks, guides, and agencies. Cruz described the package as two months of work with the local supply chain, built to answer job losses and business closures.

The summer those flights were meant to rescue is the same one that closed at 15 percent occupancy in Tulum and 30 percent in Playa del Carmen.

Hotels say November and December are 85 percent booked

The demand side has its own numbers, and they are better.

In reporting published on August 29, The Tulum Times cited Claudio Cortés Méndez, the CROC's commissioner in Tulum, who said confirmed reservations put hotel occupancy at 80 to 85 percent across November and December, above 60 percent in October, and 50 to 55 percent this month. He was specific about what those figures represent: rooms already booked rather than sales the sector still hopes to make.

Sixty percent is the threshold the same union leader named in October 2025 as the level that keeps a hotel's full payroll intact. October is the first month on his list that clears it, and the flight schedule begins on the 25th.

Two sets of promises now point at the same weeks. One is a flight program with six operators nobody has named. The other is a booking sheet that holds only if nobody cancels.

The season closes on March 27. Neither the state nor the airport has published which airlines are flying, how many seats per week they will bring, or what happens to the schedule if the Canadian routes underperform as the summer frequencies did. Until that list exists, the recovery Tulum is counting on is 13 destinations on paper and a set of reservations hotels say they already hold.

Will 13 winter destinations be enough to fill Tulum's hotels, or does the recovery need more than seats? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.