Everyone who has been here a while has said some version of the same line: this place isn't what it used to be. Look at how people have written about Playa online across forty years and a pattern shows up, one worth knowing if you run a business in the region.
There's a conversation that repeats itself at any table in Playa del Carmen. Somebody says the town isn't what it used to be, somebody else nods, and out comes a date: before Fifth Avenue closed to cars, before the big hotels, before the digital nomads, before the Maya Train.
The date changes depending on who's talking. That's the interesting part.
Everybody dates their own decline
Read through what has been written about this place from the eighties to now and something consistent shows up: each wave of arrivals called "the old Playa" whatever Playa it found when it got here.
Whoever came to dive in the mid-eighties says it went downhill when the backpackers turned up.
Whoever landed in the early nineties says it ended when they paved the streets and put up the first hotels.
Whoever showed up with a backpack in the late nineties says the town died when the chains and the all-inclusives moved in.
Whoever arrived around 2008 says the good years lasted until mass tourism came and prices went up.
Whoever came for the electronic music scene in 2017 says that was lost once it turned into an industry.
And whoever got here in the last two or three years is already saying the town changed when the digital nomads came, without noticing that plenty of them arrived at the same time.
Six different versions of the same story, spread across almost forty years. All of them sincere, all of them certain their moment was the last good one.
One fact that puts the rest in order
There's a line that turns up in almost everything written about this town: that Playa was a sleepy fishing village.
Go looking for when people stopped using it in the present tense and the answer is a surprise. The last time anyone described Playa as a fishing village in the present tense was 1995. From 1997 on it only ever appears in the past.
Which means the nostalgia for the Playa that got lost is as old as the internet in Playa. And a good share of the people who feel it arrived after that date.
That doesn't mean the town hasn't changed. It changed enormously, and there are real losses. What it means is that the feeling of having arrived too late isn't a diagnosis of the place. It's a constant of arriving.
Why this happens
The likeliest explanation has nothing to do with Playa. It has to do with how memory works.
You meet a place at a specific moment, with certain people, at a certain age, in a certain situation. That combination can't be repeated, and when it changes, the change gets pinned on the place instead of on yourself.
There's a second reason, more practical: whoever arrives, arrives to something that was already there. They find a place other people spent years building, and that finished version becomes their reference point. Everything after it looks like decline; everything before it, history.
What this has to do with your business
Three things, and all three matter now.
If you think you got here too late, check who said the same thing before you. The person who opened a business in 2008 convinced the good years were gone is today the veteran everyone asks what it was like back then. Whoever opens this year will be in that position in 2034.
The sense of having arrived too late has kept company with every person who started something here in the last forty years. And plenty of those bets worked.
Careful with selling the Playa that no longer exists. A lot of businesses still speak in the vocabulary of the moment they arrived. They describe somewhere quiet, authentic and cheap, to a customer who came looking for something else and carries no such memory.
Today's customer isn't comparing you with the Playa of 2010. They're comparing you with Tulum, with Mérida, with Medellín. That's the conversation you're in.
And nostalgia is not a strategy. It's comfortable because it explains everything without asking anything of you: if the problem is that the place changed, there's nothing to be done. But the place was always changing, and at every one of those stages there were businesses that found their customer.
The question that gets you somewhere
It isn't when Playa was better. It's who is here now and what they need.
And here is a figure that puts the conversation in order: between 2010 and 2020 the municipality went from 159,310 residents to 333,800. It doubled in a decade. Playa was the ninth fastest growing municipality in the country, and the second among those that had already passed a hundred thousand.
So anyone who feels they arrived in a different town isn't exaggerating. They literally arrived in a different town. And whoever gets here in 2030 will arrive in another one again.
Those three hundred thousand people are people working remotely, service companies, hotels and restaurants with suppliers, long-term foreign residents, and a local middle class that didn't exist twenty years ago.
None of them came for the Playa of the nineties. They came for this one, and they buy things every day.
What is worth holding on to
That the town changed doesn't oblige anyone to celebrate it. There are real costs in how it grew, and they are worth naming.
But if you have a business here, the useful conversation isn't which moment was best. It's what is happening now and what is missing.
Ten years from now somebody will say 2026 was Playa's last good year. Probably somebody who arrived this year.
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 have been here a while and want to talk through where your business is heading, bring it.
Data: Riviera Maya Economic Pulse.
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