one thing a day | 9 nights | from $2,740 per person
One Thing a Day: Nine Nights in the Yucatan Vacation Package
Nine nights on the Yucatan vacation package, with one fixed start each morning and nothing behind it. Most days you are done by noon, and the hours after that are yours to spend badly if you like.
What one thing a day means here
The diary for the Yucatan vacation package is nine lines long, one booked item on each of nine mornings. A cenote swim, a walk through a stone site, or a cooking session in a private kitchen. Every one starts early, and not for atmosphere: by one in the afternoon the open plazas sit at 95F with no shade worth the name. The item finishes, you eat, and the rest of the day has nothing in it. Nothing is booked after noon on any of the nine days.
- Hours already spoken for
- Three and a half hours on an average day, drive out and back included. Two of the nine mornings run closer to five, because the site is a long way inland.
- The earliest you must be somewhere
- 6:15 am, on two mornings out of the nine: the boat at Rio Lagartos and the far inland site. The other seven start between 7:30 and 8:30.
- The longest stretch that is yours
- Twenty and a half hours. Day five finishes at 11:45 and nothing is booked again until the 8:15 pickup the next morning.
- Who chooses where you eat
- You do, from about 11:00 onward. A guide runs the booked morning and decides nothing past it; no lunch or dinner on this trip is picked for you.
- What happens if you skip a day
- Say so the evening before and nobody comes to collect you. No money comes back, because guides, entry tickets and boat seats are paid per booking rather than per person who turns up. Two of the nine can be shifted to a later morning if there is space.
- Who this shape of day does not suit
- People who want to wake up slowly. Nine mornings in a row begin before 8:30, and on vacation that means an alarm clock nine times. It also does not suit anyone who wants the afternoons planned too: from noon nobody holds your schedule, and some travelers find that flat rather than free.
The last row costs this company bookings and stays on the page anyway. A shape of day that does not suit you is far cheaper to find out about here than on the third morning.
What the $2,740 pays for
- Nine nights across three bases: four in Merida, three in Valladolid, two on the north coast. Double or twin rooms, breakfast included at all three.
- Nine morning items with entry fees already paid: three cenotes, four stone sites, two cooking mornings.
- Every kilometer of ground transport, including the runs out to each morning item and back, in a van with air conditioning that works. Merida to Valladolid is a little over two hours, and you are not the one driving it.
- Two liters of drinking water per person per day, handed over before each start.
- A local guide for each of the nine mornings, and nobody attached to you after that.
- Pickup at Merida airport and the return run, at whatever hour your flight lands.
What you pay for separately
- Getting to Mexico. Round trip flights into Merida run roughly $420 to $780 per person from most US cities, and we place them on their own once your dates hold.
- Lunch and dinner, all nine days. Figure $22 to $45 per person per day on this route.
- Everything after noon: bicycle rental, museum entry, a second swim, the bus down to the pier.
- Tips for guides and drivers, which run about $10 per person per morning.
- Single occupancy, which adds $610 to the price above.
What it costs
from $2,740 per person
- Covering
- 9 nights, early mornings, open afternoons.
- Assuming
- Two people to a room, unless the six rows above say otherwise for your case.
- Pushed up by
- The month, the grade of room, how late you leave it, and how many of the hours you want somebody else to hold.
- Fixed when
- An operator puts it in writing with its own name on it. Until then it marks the bottom of a range that genuinely happened.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. This site gathers nothing and no card ever arrives at this company.
Months that hold, and months that do not
November through March is the run that works. Daytime highs sit in the low 80s F, mornings are dry, and the cenote water stays near 77F whatever the season.
April and May are the hard months. Highs reach 100F inland, the 7:00 start becomes the only tolerable hour, and the free afternoon you were sold gets spent under a fan. June to October brings rain most afternoons and the storm season proper from August, when a closed road can eat a morning item with no notice at all.
Two windows we would talk you out of: December 18 to January 2, when room rates in Merida roughly double and the sites are shoulder to shoulder, and the week of the March equinox, when the largest site takes tens of thousands of visitors in three days. If those dates are the only ones you have, say so and we will reorder the nine mornings around them.
Decisions left until confirmation
Four things get settled at confirmation and not before: which four of the seven stone sites you visit, since two of them are three hours inland and only make sense if you accept a 6:15 departure; whether the last two nights sit at Rio Lagartos for the shallow water and the birds or at Progreso for the pier and the fried fish; which cooking morning runs in Merida and which in a village kitchen an hour south; and the day one pickup time, which follows your flight and nothing else.