Tulum town and Tulum beach
Tulum is two different places sharing one name. The town sits on Federal Highway 307, with supermarkets, cash machines, the bus station and the cheaper places to stay. The hotel strip is a narrow road, one lane each way, running through the vegetation right along the beach, lined with small hotels and no continuous pavement. The gap between the two is not a walk you make with suitcases.
Aldea Zamá and La Veleta are the newer neighbourhoods in between, full of holiday rental apartments. Where you stay changes the whole trip: in town everything is close and transport is at hand, on the beach road you have the sea at the door and depend on a bicycle or a taxi for anything else. That is why it helps to tell us which of the three areas your accommodation is in.
Arriving at the beach after dark
The hotel strip road has no continuous street lighting, and many hotels announce themselves with a small wooden sign among the trees. At night, finding one particular entrance with a driver who does not know the stretch can cost several passes, and unlit bicycle traffic forces a slow pace. Our drivers know that road and leave the airport with the exact reference for your accommodation.
If your flight lands in Cancun in the small hours, this is also one of the longest runs on the coast, and at that time there are no shared vans or buses that will finish the job at the beach. The service runs at any hour, waiting time is not charged if the plane is late, and the price is the same at night as at midday, so a night arrival is booked exactly like a midday one.
Cenotes and ruins along the way
The stretch of Highway 307 between Playa del Carmen and Tulum holds a good share of the cenotes open to the public and runs past several nature parks, while the Tulum archaeological site sits north of the town on the cliff, above the sea. Since the vehicle carries your group alone and picks nobody else up along the road, a short stop on the way to eat or buy water is settled simply by telling the driver.
If what you want is to stop and visit a cenote or a ruin properly before reaching the hotel, tell us when you book: that stops being a direct transfer and has to be quoted separately, but it can be arranged without much trouble. What never changes is the price of the transfer itself, which is fixed before you book and already includes tolls, taxes, luggage and child seats.
