The Luxury Hotel boom Arrives in San Miguel de Allende

By Francisco Peyret

San Miguel de Allende is a destination that showed in 2018, before the pandemic, the arrival of 1.6 million visitors with an economic income of 6,682 million pesos. National tourism primarily fed its composition, according to data from the Guanajuato State Secretary of Tourism (which represented 52% and state (34%) of the total,, and to a lesser extent, international (which contributed 14% of travelers ).

According to Eduardo Zamudia, former director of the defunct Tourist Council, during the pandemic, the destination began to depend on state travelers, who contributed 73% of tourism between September 2020 and January 2021, according to the State Secretary of Tourism sources mainly from cities like León and Celaya. National tourists represented 26%, and international tourists lagged behind, contributing barely 1% of the total. According to data from the State Tourism Observatory (OTEG), from January to September, 467,521 tourists visited this city, which generated an economic benefit of just over 4,561 million pesos, a figure 48% higher than that registered in the same period of 2021.

In recent statements, the Secretary of Federal Tourism, Miguel Ángel Torruco, explained that in February of 2023, Mexico had already reached the levels of tourism of 2019. It is one of the few countries in the world to achieve these numbers, affirms the Secretary. Despite the uncertainty, it was estimated that by 2023, 21.5 million tourists would arrive by air, which would exceed 9.5% of what was observed in 2019. Now the question is, how will tourism return? In other words, after the pandemic, what are tourists looking for?

San Miguel has been one of the fastest-recovering destinations, thanks to national visitors from Mexico City and the industrial cities in the center of the country (León, Celaya, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, and Querétaro). Many of these visitors felt safe in San Miguel. Road trips with family and close friends in times of pandemic seemed trustworthy. Recently, we have added to this trend the growing connectivity of the Bajío and Querétaro airports, which in turn are expanding their frequencies and destinations.

In post-pandemic times, very visible investments have arrived, focused on attracting visitors and new residents of high economic levels with very sophisticated tourism products such as wine and equestrian developments. At the same time, in recent years, almost silently, large and prestigious global hotel brands such as Hyatt, Westin, Marriott, Hilton, Posada, and Pueblo Bonito have been arriving, but not in their traditional versions before the arrival of luxury sub-brands such as Albor, Tapestry Collection (Hilton), Clevia (Marriott), Live Aqua (Grupo Posada,) and Numu (Hyatt).

This phenomenon is significant for San Miguel because these luxury brands are in the best destinations on the planet, set up in sea destinations and, despite the pandemic, these companies did not stop anywhere. At the moment, it seems as if marketing companies the luxury brands hire have visualized something very clear for the nearby development of San Miguel.

I think this trend was marked by the arrival of Rosewood in 2011, a high-class hotel with luxury residences. It seems that the trend is to build small developments with residences and hotels, offering buyers the comfort of having all the services offered by the hotel: spa, gym, restaurant, and bar, among others. They are complementary business clusters that give developers good profits and buyers certainty in their assets. This type of stay is no longer unique to hotels. Now they are found within properties or complexes called 5 diamond (a reference to the hotel category granted by the American Automobile Association (AAA )in terms of super-luxury service and facilities). 

Why can we consider this set of investments as a boom? It is not only about a few hotels and investments that are taking place in a very short time. For now, I am not going to discuss the number of houses or apartments that accompany these hotel brands. If we look at just the number of rooms, it is understandable. Before the pandemic, San Miguel had around 200 hotel establishments with some 3,100 rooms. With these six new hotels, we will increase the supply of units with 665 rooms: Clevia (75), Westin (162), Waldorf Astoria (120), Live Aqua (153), Numu (44), and Pueblo Bonito (111).

It is a boom because dawning in the post-pandemic with a 21% increase in rooms is crazy if we take as a reference other tourist destinations where the hotel sector was truly affected. In León, Guanajuato, which boasted its high frequency and hotel occupancy (business tourism), had a 40% loss in the sector. Now that these brands are fully operational in San Miguel, we will be able to measure their true impact on attracting visitors and also on the rearrangement of internal competition in the hotel sector. At first glance, the bet on visitors who spend well seems very good. To begin with, they pay $300 and up for a room, but at the same time, these investments are accompanied by the construction of more houses, a topic that we have to talk about. 

On this topic, some opinions from our readers:

“From my perspective, the arrival of chain hotels negatively affects several issues:

In the local economy, although it is thought that these large chains provide more jobs, the reality is that they normally bring in many employees from other places and this causes an even greater growth in the local population and causes even more pressure on the entire municipal system, more water, more transport, more security and local employment is usually displaced.

Unless the municipal governments impose rules to lessen the impact that these mega investors who come to hang on the quality of life that exists in a place like San Miguel and force them to contribute to the community, the «come invest» policy without getting involved in local problems, the only thing that is going to cause is stress to a town that already has serious complications.

Parasitizing the infrastructure (in itself scarce) of the town and not contributing to it, breaks the virtuous circle of community life.

For a long time —and not only in the hotel industry— our town has been seen as “a destination” or worse still, as “a product” instead of what it originally is: a town where people live well.

I don’t understand how we let these mega investments without face and body, where the owners and investors are almost not involved, nor are they aware of local problems such as water, parking, mobility, sewage treatment, etc., come into the city.

I think that little by little these big chains are going to finish off the small hotels that are not going to have the capacity to compete with these big investments that have much more economic support to resist the changing ravages of the economy.

The world is changing and defending the local is a global concern where people and the community are being displaced by the great global economic interests. So let us support the economy of the people who are involved in the place where they invest and let us take care of the place where we live every day.”

  • Gabor Goded, architect and activist

«I think it’s great. These hotels create jobs, bring in new visitors to the city and increase exposure of our city.”

-Anonymous