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 Travel & Outdoors | March 2005 
Mexico: The New Cancun
 Ellen Creager - Detroit Free Press
| In hoisting itself out of its party town image, Cancun is relying on the development of three things: Golf, marinas, and super-luxury eco-tourism.
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Cancun, Mexico - Foam-filled dance floors and all-night tattoo parlors? That's old news here. The new trend is Cancun Deluxe.
The change lies behind high security gates beyond the city limits. It lies in dusty plats of oceanfront scrub where men with bulldozers and blueprints imagine golfing and yachting and rich tourists everywhere. It lies in new resorts dripping with chandeliers or oozing minimalist sleekness.
Hooters recently opened in Cancun. But so did Cartier.
"In Cancun, everything is in place except the place for the high-end market," says Ramon Abascal, director general of Playa Mujeres, a huge golf resort being built north of the city. "There is room for the best of the best."
In hoisting itself out of its party town image, Cancun is relying on the development of three things: Golf, to help it capture affluent duffers away from Los Cabos on Mexico's Baja Coast; marinas, to suck in American yachters and their money; and super-luxury eco-tourism, to entice folks interested in both shameless pampering and the biosphere.
"What we're building has a completely different type of atmosphere," says Lori Holland, spokeswoman for Fairmont Resorts, which will open the Fairmont Mayakoba in November. "It's 401 rooms, but all low rise, in a huge eco-area, not on the beach. We're looking for the higher-end eco-tourist."
Inclusive and Not
Since it was founded in the early 1970s, Cancun has been a turquoise dream for Americans. Cancun and its immediate neighbor, Riviera Maya, are the top two international vacation destinations for metro Detroiters, polls show. The dollar is holding its own against the peso. All-inclusives and nonstop flights from Detroit are the draw.
"People can put their wallet away and not have to come back to it," says travel agent Carolyn Kowalik of Kaye Britten Travel in Farmington Hills.
Yet high-end tourism generally is not all-inclusive, or a bargain. Cancun's new Fiesta Americana Grand Aqua opened in December with high-rise Asian minimalist design. It's beautiful - but not all-inclusive. Neither is its five-diamond sister property, Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach.
Down the coast, the most exclusive spots are unseen by most tourists: small luxury hideaways with names like the Paraiso de la Bonita Resort and Thelasso (a thelasso, in case you're wondering, is a spa); Ikal del Mar; and Maroma Resort. Have to ask how much they cost? You can't afford them.
Not to worry. All-inclusives have taken the hint that posh is in. The new RIU Palace Las Americas opened last fall in the hotel zone. It dominates the skyline with its elegant white-domed towers. Inside, the hotel conveys an opulent Italian-Spanish feel. With five restaurants, shops and even folk crafts, nobody has to leave the hotel. It's high-class treatment at a middle-class price.
"The tourists like it," says Orlando Mendoza of Cancun's Lomas Travel. As a Cancun native, he worries that all-inclusives put local restaurants and shops out of business.
But who even knows if all-inclusives will last? The Cancun region of today is not the Cancun region you will visit five years from now. Typical of the big changes coming is Playa Mujeres.
Golf as a Draw
A hot afternoon. A driver brings me through one high, guarded gate of burnished metal and thatch. We pass a courtyard where, strangely, toucans, horses, snakes, dogs and even two jaguars are kept. Beyond another immense gate, the paved road turns into a sand road, which leads to a guest house, the only finished building on the property. In a round library with soaring shelves two stories high, I find myself sitting across a handmade desk from Ramon Abascal, the architect and director of this project.
Abascal explains the $1.3-billion plan for Playa Mujeres' 929 acres: four hotels, thousands of condos and residences, a marina for 205 yachts, two Greg Norman-designed golf courses (the first opens in October) and shopping. The golf and shopping will be open to the public. The rest will be private and exclusive. The main draw? Golf.
"If you go to Los Cabos, you see all the golf courses. It's not enough to have one course; high-end people like to play different courses," he says. Within five years, the Cancun/Maya Riviera area should have 15-16 golf courses, says Oscar Ordonez, Playa Mujeres' general manager. That will be more than enough to hook the American East Coast market.
I try to concentrate on all the details, but it is hard because the library looks out on a gorgeous, deep blue pool and the ocean beyond. Plus, this guest house, which Abascal designed, is full of handmade furniture and complex inlayed doors. The vistas are amazing. Two round showers tiled in azure blue are open to the sky. This one-of-a-kind Mexican contemporary architecture sets upscale projects apart from ordinary hotels. Sure, some low-budget places in Cancun will still be developed, Abascal says, but, "there is room for all these markets if well-done."
Later, project engineer Luis Moreno gives me a tour in a 4-wheel-drive Ford. The $23-million Norman-designed course - the first one - is still all sand and angles, but will look quite different when the saltwater-hardy paspalum grass goes in this spring.
"Here's the 10th hole," Moreno says. "Here's the 11th hole," he says, pointing to another long fairway. We drive through deep sand to the very top of the 13th fairway. Look one way, and you see acres of drain pipes sticking out of the ground, and men with shovels. Look the other way, you see the cool blue ocean that stretches eight miles to Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women.
Coming to Cancun
Developers know Playa Mujeres will work only if other high-end development projects like golf courses and marinas reach a critical mass. Among the other developments tourists will see in Cancun in the next five years:
•Mayakoba. Near Playa del Carmen on the Riviera Maya, upscale amenities arise in the forest. Encompassing 1,600 acres of formerly public land, it includes another Greg Norman-designed course whose first nine holes is due to open in June. The Fairmont Mayakoba hotel starts taking reservations in May for its opening in November. In the next two years, three hotels - Mandarin Oriental (2006), Rosewood Laguna Kai (2007) and Banyan Tree (2007) will join it. Mayakoba also plans a marina for 322 yachts, plus hundreds of condos and private homes.
•Puerto Cancun, a strip on the ocean northwest of the Cancun hotel zone, is an ambitious public project. Right now, all you can see are big billboards on the fences surrounding the empty, scrubby oceanfront acres, but look hard and you can see the beautiful beach beyond. The project has been the subject of money woes and controversy, but infrastructure - roads, sewers, water, electricity - should be in place by June. Plans include an 18-hole golf course designed by Tom Weiskopf, more than 4,000 hotel rooms, a marina for 330 boats, shops and condos.
•Costa Cancun, another golf resort being planned by Fonatur, Mexico's tourism development agency, will occupy the very south end of the hotel zone near Club Med. Its centerpiece? A 36-hole Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course.
•More shopping. Sure, Cancun now has two Wal-Marts. But in December, the hotel zone also got a new shopping complex unsubtly called Luxury Avenue. It contains stores by Cartier, Ferragamo, Fendi, Montblanc, Louis Vuitton and more. By the end of 2005, look for an expanded La Isla Mall. Even the once tiny town of Playa del Carmen in the Riviera Maya is booming and changing as it grows.
•Bigger airports and more airports. The company that runs Cancun's international airport, Asur, plans a $40-million second runway by 2008. Last year, the airport had the most international arrivals of any Mexican airport - 10 million, up 15 percent from 2003. There is even talk of a new airport 50 miles south, deep in the Mayan Riviera near Tulum. That is opposed by Asur, not to mention ecology advocates. Stay tuned.
All these things are coming. But they haven't happened yet. At this very moment at the RIU Palace on the Cancun strip, American tourists loll by the two infinity pools, quaff pina coladas, lie in the sun and walk the white beach. It's like an unmovable cruise ship. Let's see, we have five restaurants, all your food included, ocean views, a balcony. Such luxury is open to the average person, and OK, maybe the sculptures are copies and the frescoes and paintings are, too, but it sure looks nice.
I compare it to the Cancun Ritz-Carlton, though, where the stuffy paintings are original and the sideboards are imported and the carpet is thick as golf course grass. The hush of the rich, ah, that's what Cancun is looking for.
In the next decade, perhaps they may find it. |
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