Cancún Hotels Fall Short of Summer 2025 Goals

Cancún, Mexico — The statistical record of hotel occupancy in Cancún, Puerto Morelos, and Isla Mujeres shows percentages below the expectations set for the summer 2025 season. As of the third week of August, the penultimate week before the season concludes, the average hotel occupancy rate stood at 68.5 percent for Cancún, 63.3 percent for Isla Mujeres, and 72.9 percent in the continental zone of Isla Mujeres.

The previous month, July, also did not close with the expected figures. Cancún averaged 76.7 percent; Puerto Morelos averaged 70.7 percent, while Isla Mujeres did reach 80.1 percent, according to the barometer from the Association of Hotels of Cancún, Puerto Morelos, and Isla Mujeres.

Prior to the start of the summer season, Rodrigo de la Peña, the leader of Cancún's hoteliers, anticipated that if things went well, the season could close with sustained occupancies of 78 to 80 percent, but he acknowledged that it would be difficult to exceed 82 percent.

Compared to 2024, Cancún is projected to close the month of August 6.6 percentage points lower, as the same month last year Cancún reported an average occupancy of 75.1 percent, according to the weekly monitoring conducted by the federal Secretary of Tourism in 12 coastal destinations across the country.

The lowest occupancy rates have been seen in Puerto Morelos, where the 63.3 percent average during August is more than 16 percentage points below the 80 percent that was forecast to be the average across all destinations in the Mexican Caribbean.

On the other hand, Isla Mujeres, in its continental part, is at 72.9 percent occupancy in the third week of the present month, while in July it did achieve the 80 percent sustained occupancy that state authorities had anticipated.

Hotel Occupancy Affected by Number of Rooms

In a previous interview, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, Secretary of Tourism for Quintana Roo, stated that declines in hotel occupancy should not necessarily be interpreted as a lower influx of visitors. He noted that it is important to consider that the state has continued to grow in hotel infrastructure, reaching nearly 136,000 rooms so far this year.

This means that although the number of American visitors has increased to 7.6 million, the number of rooms is gigantic, requiring ever greater efforts to satisfy all that lodging supply in the state.