About us
About Cozumel Attractions
An island whose best geography is underwater: a wall of Mesoamerican reef, a current that does the swimming for you, and a hard all-aboard time if you came off a ship.
Cozumel Attractions is an independent guide to Cozumel. We are a small editorial team, not a tourism board, not a booking agency and not the operator of anything you will read about here. We publish 32 places, 22 category guides and 10 long-form guides about one destination, and nothing else — which is the whole point.
The most interesting geography on Cozumel is the part you need a tank to see. The island's west shore drops onto the northern end of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest reef system on earth, and the current runs along that drop-off from south to north almost every day. Divers here do not swim a site. They roll in at the southern end of Palancar or Santa Rosa, hang neutral, and let the water carry them along the wall while the boat follows their bubbles and picks them up a mile or two from where they went in. Nothing about it rewards effort, which is why experienced divers describe Cozumel as easy and new divers sometimes find it counter-intuitive: the skill being tested is buoyancy and patience, not fitness. Visibility is routinely eighty to a hundred feet and sometimes far beyond that.
- 32Places covered
- 22Category guides
- 10Long-form guides
- 8news posts
Why this exists
What an aggregator cannot tell you
Search almost any destination and you get the same four kinds of page: a booking platform's auto-generated list, a content farm rewriting that list, a hotel chain selling you a room, and a forum thread from 2016. All four can tell you that Cozumel has beaches. None of them can tell you which car park fills first on a Saturday, which crossing is unpleasant on a bike, which much-recommended attraction is not worth the drive, or which month the water is actually warm enough to swim in.
That is the gap this site is built to fill. Everything here is written to be useful to someone with a specific decision to make — which beach, which morning, which boat, with which people — and we would rather publish a page that tells you not to bother than one that is enthusiastic about everything.
One destination, in depth
We do not cover the world. Every page on this domain is about Cozumel, which is why we can afford to check things that a hundred-destination site never could.
No page per listing
We deliberately do not generate a page for every bookable tour. It would be duplicate content, it would cannibalise our own guides, and it would put a pointless click between you and the booking. Tours appear on the pages that explain them.
Downsides in writing
Crowds, parking fees, seasonal closures, biting insects, the hour the traffic turns. A guide that only says nice things is an advert, and you can already tell the difference.
Free things get the same effort
Public beaches, town parks and free trails earn us nothing and are researched exactly as hard as the things that do. It is the simplest test of whether any of the rest of this is true.
How it is made
How this guide is researched
How we work
How this guide is researched
Every page on Cozumel Attractions starts from a primary source — the agency that runs the land, the operator that runs the boat, the ordinance that governs the parking — and not from another guide's summary of it. Where a fact is volatile, we date it and tell you to check. Where we could not confirm something, we say that instead of guessing, because a confident wrong answer about a closing time costs you an afternoon.
Disclosure
Our news is machine-written. We label it.
The news feed on Cozumel Attractions is generated by software from sources we have already verified, not typed by a reporter. Every factual claim in a generated article is traced back to a named source before it publishes, an editor can override or delete any of it, and each article says on its face how it was written. Our guides, category pages and attraction write-ups are a different thing entirely: those are written and edited by the people on our masthead.
The money
How Cozumel Attractions is paid
We earn a commission from Viator on bookings made through our links. The price is identical to booking at the pier or online direct. Nobody pays us to be recommended.
The masthead
Who writes it
Every guide and every article on Cozumel Attractions is signed. These are the bylines you will see.
Ana Lucía Ferrer
Senior Editor
Ana Lucía has edited Mexican Caribbean travel coverage for eleven years and runs the practical pages on this site: taxi zone fares, park admissions, ferry schedules and what a cruise day can realistically hold. She checks a tariff board or a port notice before she checks…
Diego Marín
Dive & Water Editor
Diego worked as a divemaster on Cozumel boats before he wrote about them, and has the current on Santa Rosa mapped in his head by month. He covers diving, snorkelling, the marine park rules and the fishing fleet, and he will tell you plainly when a site is wrong for your…
Sofía Ruelas
Culture & Island Life Editor
Sofía writes about the island that exists after the ships leave: San Gervasio and the Ixchel pilgrimage, Carnaval, the Día de Muertos altars, and the kitchens four blocks inland from the malecón. She reports in Spanish first, names the people and businesses she writes about, and…
Straight answers
What we are not
Not the operator, and not the merchant
We do not run tours, take bookings, hold your money or issue refunds. When you book, your contract is with the operator through our booking partner, and their terms are the ones that apply. If something goes wrong on a trip, they are who you need — though we would still like to hear about it.
Not a review site
We publish no user reviews and we have never written a fake one. Star ratings you see on a tour come from our booking partner's verified bookings and are labelled as theirs. Our own verdicts are signed by an editor and argued for in writing.
Not official, and not affiliated
We are not connected to any tourism authority, chamber of commerce, park service or local government in Cozumel. We read what they publish and we link to it; nobody approves a page before it goes out.
Not infallible
Prices move, operators sell up, a free lot starts charging. Every page carries a visible last-updated date so you can weigh it, and a correction takes about a minute to send.
Who we are and how we work
- Editorial standards
How we research, verify, label and correct what we publish.
- How we make money
The affiliate relationship, stated plainly.
- Our writers
The bylines on this site, and what each of them covers.
- Contact
Corrections, questions and press enquiries.
Prefer to start reading rather than reading about us? The Cozumel homepage is where most people begin, and the attractions directory has everything we cover in one filterable list.