Running vacation rentals in Mahahual, Mexico, where 571 cruise ships docked in 2025

The SAT's withholding rules for booking platforms are the same across Mexico, and they live on the national vacation rentals page.

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

Royal Caribbean has owned the Costa Maya pier since July 2025. In September 2026 Grupo Animal reported that two Carnival Jubilee sailings out of Galveston, in May and November 2027, no longer stop at Costa Maya, though Carnival hasn't said it's leaving the port. Cruise passengers don't sleep in your house, but the restaurants, shops and tours your guests use live off those ships, so it's worth putting the cruise days in the guest guide.

In February 2026 Mahahual residents shut access to the pier for almost four hours, and about 3,000 passengers from three ships couldn't go ashore to sightsee (Por Esto). One of their demands was to regularize the Nuevo Mahahual neighborhood, which has no street lights, no garbage pickup and no paved streets. If your house is there, guests need to know before they arrive how to find it after dark and what to do with the trash.

The power goes out a lot. In January 2026 local business owners told Por Esto that outages come two or three times a month, that some have lasted a full day, that the internet drops, and that Mahahual has no CFE office, so repair crews drive in from Bacalar. After a long outage, someone has to check the fridge and the air conditioning before the next guest walks in.

Every cruise passenger pays a 5-dollar fee, and a trust splits the money between projects in Cozumel and in Othón P. Blanco. In January 2026 Sedetur said Mahahual's share would go to the look of the town, security and garbage collection, with no final amounts yet (Riviera Maya News). Residents told Por Esto they hadn't seen any improvement in more than a year, so for now it's safer not to plan around those works.

In the photo checklist you can make checking the fridge and the air conditioning a required item, so you don't hear about a dead fridge from a guest. Your cleaner works through it room by room on their phone, and at the end you get the report with the time of every photo.

In the guest guide we put the cruise days, how to reach the house at night, what to do in a power cut and where the trash goes. It opens on the guest's phone, and it comes in English and Spanish.

We connect your Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify or Uplisting calendar, or import your iCal, and every checkout creates its cleaning task.

If you manage vacation rentals or run a cleaning company in Mahahual, Upbridge can help with what happens between one booking and the next, from a photo of every room to the instructions your guest opens on their phone.

With five-day stays and houses that are nearly always rented whole, every checkout means cleaning the entire place, and after an outage there's the fridge to deal with too. With the cleaning company account you put all your clients' checkouts in one calendar, from whichever iCal or PMS each owner uses, and the client stays yours.

Bacalar · Tulum · Cozumel · Playa del Carmen · Holbox