Running vacation rentals in Mazunte and Zipolite, Mexico, where February is the busiest month

The SAT withholding that Airbnb and Vrbo apply to every booking doesn't change from one village to the next; it's on our Mexico page.

This is not legal or tax advice, and Upbridge does not file anything for you: no registrations and no tax returns.

In Zipolite, according to AirROI, half of what's listed is private rooms, and among the whole homes with a bedroom count, none had three bedrooms or more. Guests stay 5.5 nights on average and pay around 1,566 pesos a night. A place that size cleans quickly, but with stays of nearly a week you get roughly one checkout per house every seven days, and in season several of them land on the same Saturday. The slowest month, again per AirROI, is September.

Water comes first. In June 2022, after Hurricane Agatha, Zipolite's municipal agent told El Universal that the village had no drinking-water network, that its four wells had been pumping salt water for two years, and that piping water in would cost about 30 million pesos. In the meantime water came by truck. We found no newer report saying that has changed. For whoever cleans, that means knowing which house has a cistern, how much is left before the linens go in the wash, and who to call for the truck.

Neither village has an airport, so the last stretch is always by road. Excélsior puts the drive at about an hour and fifteen minutes from Huatulco airport and an hour and a half from Puerto Escondido's, and the bus from Oaxaca City takes six to seven hours to Pochutla, plus another 30 to 40 minutes on local transport. A guest who leaves Oaxaca in the morning may knock on your door after dark, so the instructions for getting in have to work with nobody there to meet them.

Zipolite faces the open ocean and has strong rip currents. Swimming isn't banned, but in October 2025 TV Azteca reported that there are few lifeguards and that medical help is slow to arrive. Over in Mazunte, a Pueblo Mágico since 2015, the Oaxaca government handed over 26 million pesos in April 2026 for the first phase of work on the Centro Mexicano de la Tortuga, the turtle center that many guests come to see.

In the guest guide we build for each place, we cover the drive from Huatulco or Pochutla, how to get in after dark, and a plain warning about Zipolite's currents. About four in ten reviews come from Mexican guests and most of the rest from the US and Canada, so we write it in Spanish and English. The guest opens it on their phone.

In each house's photo checklist you can make a photo of the cistern level a required step before the laundry starts, and when the clean is done you get a report with the time of every step. If the cistern is running low, you find out that same day and order the truck in time.

For the week of the nudist gathering and the rest of February, every checkout coming from your Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, Uplisting or the house's iCal creates its cleaning task, and one calendar shows you which Saturday three houses empty out at once.

Mazunte and Zipolite span two municipalities and a lot of owners with one or two houses each. With the cleaning company account you put each owner's iCal or PMS into the same calendar, plan the day's route along the coast, and every client stays yours, with no cut taken from any job.