Some hotels that opened when Playa del Carmen was a fishing village are still running today. It is worth looking at what they did differently.
Lucio Kantún Chí, a primary school teacher, arrived in Playa del Carmen in 1970 and built the town's first hotel, on avenida Juárez. He named it Playa del Carmen and started with three palapas, the thatched roof structures people build here. At that point the town had fewer than three hundred residents.
That hotel grew to twenty five rooms and kept running for more than forty years. Kantún Chí sold it around 2015, and in 2017 it was still taking guests.
And it is not the only one. There are businesses on this coast that have been open four or five decades, while everything around them changed names three times.
What they did has less to do with luck than it seems.
They started small and grew with what came in
Three palapas. A base for divers.
That is how two of the longest running cases on the corridor began, and neither started with a big investment or a twenty room plan.
Club Akumal Caribe began as the base for the CEDAM divers, the underwater exploration club that Pablo Bush Romero founded in the late fifties. It was not built as a hotel: it was built so that a group of people had somewhere to sleep, and the hotel came out of that.
And Kantún Chí's was three palapas that grew as people kept arriving.
Neither of them bet everything up front. And that gave them something you cannot buy: time to learn what worked before committing serious money.
They looked after the building
This is the least glamorous part and the one that weighs most.
Hotel Molcas, which stood next to the ferry pier and opened in the seventies, closed in 2015. Not for lack of customers: it closed because its structure had deteriorated.
A hotel in the most valuable position in Playa del Carmen, right where people arrive from Cozumel, and what took it off the market was maintenance.
On a coast with salt, humidity and hurricanes, a building that is not maintained is finished in twenty years. And the cost of repairing it once it is damaged is several times the cost of having looked after it.
The ones still open renovated in stages and on time. Shangri-La Caribe was sold in December 2008 to a group of American investors, was fully renovated, and the following year became Mahekal. The one in Akumal has gone through several rounds of work without closing.
It is not that they had better luck with the weather. It is that they replaced things before they fell apart.
They settled their liabilities before those grew
Two of the best known closures on this coast came neither from a lack of customers nor from the land not being theirs.
La Rana Cansada opened in 1984, was one of the first places on Quinta Avenida, and was evicted in November 2024 over an award from a labor case filed in 2009. Fifteen years between the origin of the problem and the day it shut its doors.
And there was a second factor: both its owners died, he in 2022 and she in May 2024, apparently with no succession settled. The land was theirs. What was not settled was what happened to the business once they were gone.
In the hotel strip of Tulum, between 2011 and 2016, 44 hotels and 19 plots were cleared out. In October 2017 a federal judge ordered several of them returned, which gives you an idea of how those evictions had been carried out.
And the mechanism was the same one used on Quinta Avenida: the labor courts.
That is what a small business can actually prevent. An unsettled labor liability grows quietly for years and shows up on the day that suits you least. And an undefined succession leaves the business hanging exactly when it most needs to keep running.
The ones that have been open forty years have their contracts in order and know who comes next. It is not glamorous and it is what keeps them standing.
What this says to a business starting out
The three factors are not about hotels. They apply to any business that wants to still be open in ten years.
Start with what you can carry. Three palapas that grow are worth more than twenty rooms that put you in debt. The size you start at does not determine the size you end at.
Look after what you already have before buying more. The place, the equipment, the customers who already buy from you. Replacing on time always costs less than repairing.
Keep your employment contracts current. It is the dullest work there is and it is the mechanism that has closed more businesses on this coast than any other. An agreement left unsigned today is an award against you ten years from now.
Define what happens if you are not there. A business with no succession defined stops the day the person holding it up is missing.
Why this matters here
Playa del Carmen has a business turnover rate that anyone who lives here recognizes: places that open and close in the same year, concepts that last a season, signs that change every so often.
Measuring it is another matter: the INEGI study that calculates how long a business lasts goes down to the municipal level for a hundred municipalities in the country, and this one is not among them. What we do know is the state figure: between 2019 and 2021, 46.59% of Quintana Roo's establishments closed, the highest share in the country.
In that context, a business that has been open forty years is not a nice anecdote. It is evidence that it can be done.
And that what makes it possible is not a stroke of luck or a brilliant idea, but three or four dull decisions taken on time.
At Kiin Hub we have the Mesa Kiin: putting your case in front of people who know different things. Tax and accounting, labor, value proposition, process and technology. If you are building something you want to last, bring it and we will look at it.
Sources: Lucio Kantún Chí's account in Quintana Roo Hoy (November 15, 2017), Noticaribe (September 12, 2015 and November 15, 2024), Travel Weekly (December 2009), Animal Político (February 2017) and Expansión (October 2017).
Share this article