Riviera Maya Tourism To Grow 10%+ This Year

Playa del Carmen -- News of even more flights scheduled to arrive at the Cancun International Airport starting this summer indicates that tourism to Playa del Carmen and the Riviera Maya will increase between 10% and 12%, according to local officials.

Even with the slowing economy in the U.S., 2008 is expected to be a record year, in terms of total arrivals, occupancy levels and revenue. The new flights are mostly from European destinations, including Barcelona, Portugal and Madrid.

Travel from Canada is expected to increase as well, making officials very optimistic about the increased projections.

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Riviera Maya Tops 32,000 Rooms

This month, the number of rooms in the Riviera Maya has topped 32,000. Significant recent openings include the 408-room first hotel of the Spanish chain Valentin and the 401-room Fairmont Mayakoba. Though this represents impressive growth for the year, it's actually less than was forecast, due to the delay of some projects for financial and environmental assessment delays.

Major openings for early 2008 include the 128-room Rosewood Mayakoba and the 142-room Viceroy Mayakoba. The forecast for 2008 calls for the creation of an additional 2800 rooms, bringing the Riviera Maya total to nearly 35,000.

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Year Ends With Record Numbers

The Riviera Maya closed 2006 with a week in which hotel occupancy rates were 90%. Even MayanHoliday.com travel consultants had a hard time finding rooms for guests during the holidays. Cancun's occupancy rates were an impressive 95%. These figures are higher than the figures from 2004 and help to prove that the region is fully recovered from damage caused by Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

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NEWS FLASH - Tulum Receives Most Visitors

Nearly a million tourists visited the 12 archaeological zones of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, home of The Riviera Maya, during 2006, according to local officials. The most visited site was Tulum, which is only 45 minutes south of Playa del Carmen. It received 80% of the nearly 7,000 daily visitors that the sites get. Though there are other sites in the area, a lack of well-maintained roads has kept tour groups from exploring much farther south than Tulum. Officials plan to improve the roads to take some pressure off Tulum and to get more exposure to other areas of the state.

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A Year of Development for The Riviera Maya

PLAYA DEL CARMEN - Local officials report that the Riviera Maya will have approximately 35,000 hotel rooms in by the middle of 2007. In September of 2006, it had 29,462, with 31,400 expected in operation by December 31, 2006.

This marks the second most rooms ever added to the region's inventory, just after 1998, with more than 5,000 rooms were constructed.

The Riviera Maya is on the cusp of passing Cancun (which has around 30,000 rooms) as the largest largest destination in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, which also makes it one of the nation's largest.

Tourism officials forecast that the region will finish with 2,821,000 visitors in 2006, with an average hotel occupancy rate of 78%.

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