Cancún, and the seaweed problem

1. Jan 28° today's fare
2. Feb 29°
3. Mar 30°
4. Apr 31°
5. May 33°
6. Jun 33°
7. Jul 34°
8. Aug 34°
9. Sep 33° not sold
10. Oct 31° not sold
11. Nov 29°
12. Dec 28°

10 of 12 months on sale. The reason is below, not in the numbers.

1. 01

   Do Chichén Itzá early or not at all

   Entry for foreign visitors is 697 pesos (about £29), split at the gate into a federal and a state ticket — bring cash for the second, which several booths will not take by card. It is two hours from Cancún and the site has almost no shade, so the coaches that arrive at eleven put people on open limestone at the worst hour. Go on the first bus or drive yourself and be at the gate at opening. Three hours covers it properly.

2. 02

   Swim in a cenote, and pick a quiet one

   Sinkholes in the limestone, filled with rainwater filtered through rock, at a constant temperature all year. Entry runs 200 to 400 pesos (about £8 to £17). The Ruta de los Cenotes inland from Puerto Morelos has dozens with a fraction of the crowds at Ik Kil, which is the one every Chichén Itzá tour stops at. Sun cream must be washed off before entering — it kills the ecosystem, and most sites enforce it at the door.

3. 03

   Take the ADO bus rather than a transfer

   The airport coach into the hotel zone costs about 170 pesos (£7) against thirty or forty pounds for a private transfer, runs from terminals 2, 3 and 4, and is comfortable and air-conditioned. The catch is frequency — departures every two hours during the day only — so it suits a daytime arrival. The same ADO network runs down the coast to Playa del Carmen for about 250 pesos (£10) and on to Tulum for a little more, and is how most independent travellers move here.

4. 04

   Snorkel the reef at Puerto Morelos

   Half an hour south, a national marine park where the reef sits close inshore and the boats are run by a local cooperative rather than the resorts. Two hours with a guide is about £30 including the park fee. It is regulated: no sun cream, no touching, limited numbers, guide compulsory — which is exactly why it is in better condition than the sites the big operators use. The village itself is what Cancún was before 1970.

5. 05

   Check the seaweed before you commit a beach day

   This costs nothing and it is the most useful thing on this page. Several trackers publish daily beach-by-beach reports with photographs for the whole coast. Sargassum lands unevenly — one bay can be buried while another two kilometres away is clear — and the sheltered north-facing beaches at Playa Caracol and Isla Mujeres often stay clean when the east-facing strip does not. Look at today's photographs, not at a brochure.

• Beer, downtown bar £1.60 a Modelo; the same bottle on the hotel strip is nearer £6
• Dinner for two, mid-range £30 downtown; hotel-zone restaurants are two to three times it
• Airport to the hotel zone £7 ADO coach; a private transfer is £30 to £40
• Visitax, per visitor £12 state tourist tax, paid online, checked when you leave
• Cenote entry £8–£17 per person; the inland ones are cheaper and emptier
• Tacos al pastor, three £2.50

Checked August 2026. Sources at the foot of this page.

Airport

CUN, twenty minutes south of the hotel zone and the second busiest airport in Mexico. Arrivals opens into a corridor of aggressive timeshare touts posing as transfer or information desks — walk past all of them to the marked ADO counter or the official taxi rank outside. This is the single most reported annoyance of a Cancún arrival.

Entry

No visa, plus a state tourist tax in Quintana Roo. Visitax, set by Quintana Roo — paid at visitax.gob.mx; the amount is set by the state and changes. Up to up to 180 days, at the officer's discretion. Valid for the duration of your stay; the Mexican embassy advises 180 days, being the longest a tourist can stay. Cancún sits in Quintana Roo, which charges its own entry tax on top of anything national. Pay it online at visitax.gob.mx before you travel or during the stay, and keep the proof — it is checked before you leave the airport on departure, which is a bad moment to discover it. The days written into your entry stamp are what counts, not the 180-day maximum; officers routinely grant less.

Currency

Mexican peso, though the hotel zone quotes and takes US dollars at a rate that favours the seller. Pay in pesos wherever you can and decline the card machine's offer to charge you in sterling. ATMs inside bank branches rather than freestanding ones in shops; the latter carry heavy fees and skimming reports.

Language

Spanish. English is universal in the hotel zone and on the tourist coast, and thins quickly downtown and inland. Maya is still spoken in the villages around the archaeological sites.

Time zone

Six hours behind the UK. Quintana Roo keeps a fixed time zone and does not observe daylight saving, so the gap becomes five hours when Britain moves its clocks forward.

Plugs

Type A and B, 127V. A British type-G plug does not fit and the voltage is roughly half of home; chargers cope, hair appliances often do not.

Health

The GHIC does not apply. Private hospitals in the hotel zone are good and expensive and there have been repeated reports of inflated billing for tourists, so an insurer who will deal with them directly matters more here than usual. Drink bottled water. Sun cream must be the reef-safe kind for the cenotes and the marine parks, and it is checked.

Safety

The FCDO advises against all but essential travel to several Mexican states, none of them Quintana Roo, and notes that violence linked to organised crime does occasionally occur in tourist areas of this state. In practice the hotel zone is heavily policed. The everyday risks are the timeshare touts at the airport, unlicensed taxis, and rip currents on the open Caribbean side when the flags are red.