The drops in hotel occupancy in Quintana Roo raise fears that in recent years more new resorts have been built in Cancún, Riviera Maya, Tulum, and their surroundings than the demand can handle.
Last year, Quintana Roo added 5,000 hotel rooms, surpassing 133,000 rooms, which represents an increase of about one-third compared to the nearly 100,000 offered before the Covid pandemic.
The state Secretary of Tourism, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, already pointed out this sudden growth in the hotel sector as one of several factors that, after being “used to breaking records,” “this summer was not the case”.
The hotel infrastructure of Quintana Roo, as revealed by REPORTUR.mx, added two hundred hotels in just three years, which is a world record compared to other destinations of similar population size.
Five years ago, the president of the Iberostar Group, Miguel Fluxá, already stated that “we do not want to go to super-mature areas to build a mega-hotel in Riviera Maya. This is not a good idea because there is an excess of supply” (Owner of Iberostar sees “excess supply” of hotels in Riviera Maya).
However, Bernardo Cueto Riestra countered that this summer there was no collapse in hotel occupancy despite the 70% average this summer, as he considered that if the new hotel rooms and new Airbnb accommodations are excluded, more than 90% occupancy could have been achieved.
Cueto indicated that there are currently 133,000 hotel rooms, while in other seasons there were only 110,000 that needed to be filled, and that “if we do not count the newly created hotel rooms and Airbnb units this year, the percentage would have exceeded 90%,” thus confirming fears that the new supply may have grown more than the market could absorb.
Source: Reportur
