The Long Shoulder: Hotels Reckon with Slower Recovery

The rain had stopped by mid-morning at the Bahía Verde Resort, leaving the grounds steaming in the tropical heat. In the dining room, three tables were occupied by guests—a couple from Tierra Verde, a solo traveller reading on the porch, and a family of four who had booked a week-long stay. The hotel's general manager, Roberto Jesús Morales, stood at the front desk reviewing the week's reservation list. Forty-two rooms occupied out of one hundred and twenty. The occupancy rate, he said, was typical for late October.

Typical, but no longer acceptable. Morales has managed the Bahía Verde for eight years, and he remembers October as a month when occupancy climbed toward seventy percent as northern-hemisphere autumn sent early-season travellers southward. Last year it hovered around fifty-five percent. This year, the average is tracking toward forty-eight percent. The off-season, he said, is lasting longer.

Across Puerto Azul and the smaller coastal towns, the pattern repeats. The pandemic's impact on tourism faded by 2024, and operators expected a swift return to pre-crisis occupancy levels by 2025. Instead, recovery has plateaued. The Federal Statistical Office's latest tourism report, released in September, showed that Costa Mar received 187,000 visitors in the first nine months of 2026—a seven percent increase over the same period in 2025, but still eleven percent below 2019 levels.