Just a year after it opened to great publicity and a drumbeat of announcements of new flights, U.S. airlines have been cutting back on flights, finding that they may have overestimated the market.
American Airlines’ network chief Brian Znotins told The Points Guy that “the whole industry getting in there all at the same time was too much capacity to absorb all at once; we need to get people more familiar with Tulum — there are plenty of people familiar with Tulum, but we had way more seats than people familiar with Tulum, so you’re seeing us and the whole industry scale back and take a step back a bit.”
The brand-new airport was conceived as an easy alternate to busy Cancun and a gateway to southern parts of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, which previously required a two-hour bus ride from Cancun. The airlines aren’t cutting out Tulum altogether; they’re just sending fewer planes from fewer cities—for now. Among those who have made significant aside from American are JetBlue and United.
