Tulum

Here is something almost nobody is telling you about Tulum: it is having a hard time, and that makes this the best moment to go in about ten years.

The numbers are not subtle. Hotel occupancy across the municipality ran at 63.7 per cent in the first seven months of 2026, down from 72.7 per cent the year before, and the coastal strip dipped to around fifteen per cent in low season. Roughly a thousand hotel rooms are currently closed. The archaeological zone is seeing something like a quarter fewer visitors. Aeromexico pulled out of the new Tulum airport at the end of September, Volaris goes in January, and international routes there have fallen from twelve to four. Properties in the worst-affected stretches have cut rates by up to forty per cent.

Tulum got expensive, crowded and a little pleased with itself, and the correction has arrived. What is left behind is the thing that made everyone fall in love in the first place – a twenty-kilometre beach road through the jungle, the largest underwater cave system on earth running underneath it, a Mayan city on a cliff above the Caribbean, and a handful of genuinely extraordinary hotels. Only now you can get a table, a room and a stretch of sand to yourself.

Two honest caveats before we go further, and I would rather you hear them from me: sargassum had a record year, and the ruins are harder to reach than your old guidebook says. Both are manageable, and I will tell you exactly how.