Mayakoba is four resorts sharing one address, a private community of clear-water canals cut through mangrove on the Riviera Maya. Fairmont got here first. It opened in 2006, before the canals had a reputation and before Rosewood, Banyan Tree and Andaz arrived to give the place its luxury shorthand, and in 2026 it is marking twenty years with a programme of art exhibitions called Past, Present and Paradise.

That head start explains most of what the resort is now. It is the largest of the four, with a listed 401 rooms and suites spread across roughly 45 acres of the wider community, and it is the one that behaves least like a boutique hotel. There are two kids’ clubs, a main pool you could lose a family in, and an optional all-inclusive package — three things nobody would write about Rosewood next door.

Whether that reads as a warning or a relief is the whole question, and it depends almost entirely on who is travelling with you.

I slept here

Twenty years of planting

The single most underrated advantage of arriving first is that your trees are older than everyone else’s. Fairmont’s own material describes Mayakoba as a private community of some 594 acres of jungle; the Fairmont’s slice of it has had two decades to close over. In my photographs the fan palms lean across the paths rather than standing politely beside them, the planting beds run to dark red croton and heliconia thick enough to hide the edging, and the canal banks are properly overgrown. It does not look landscaped. It looks kept.

The other thing the head start bought is scale. Rosewood and Banyan Tree are villa properties. Fairmont is a resort, in the older and more literal sense: buildings, corridors, a lobby with a florist’s arrangement the length of a console table, a golf course running through the back of it. El Camaleón, the Greg Norman course that hosts the PGA Tour’s World Wide Technology Championship, sits directly against the property, and one of my photographs of a garden path has the fairway sitting open and green just off the left shoulder.

The casitas

The building block here is the casita: two-storey blocks of a handful of rooms each, dropped into the mangrove along the lagoon or set back from the beach. Fairmont’s own room list runs from Beach Area and Beachfront Casitas at ground level, through the taller Fairmont Rooms and View Rooms, up to Signature Casita Suites with butler service, two named Presidential suites — El Camaleón and La Tortuga — and a set of multi-bedroom Residences with private pools and grills.

What the photographs show, consistently, is that the terraces are the room. Every casita balcony I shot has furniture that assumes you will sit on it for a while: a round cushioned daybed on one, a table and a pair of wicker chairs on another, and in both cases a hardwood railing with nothing beyond it but mangrove. There is no view in the postcard sense. There is a wall of trees a few feet away, and birds in it.

Inside, the finish is warm rather than fashionable — travertine floors, dark timber, a stone-topped double vanity, a deep tub set against a window that looks straight into planting. It is not the pale, stripped-back palette the newer Mayakoba properties use, and it will read to some people as dated. It also means nothing in the room is trying very hard, which after four days is not a complaint.

The lagoon does most of the work

Mayakoba’s canals are dug, not natural, but they connect to the limestone that riddles this coast, and what they attract is not decorative. My own frames from the water’s edge include two turtles hauled out on a rock ledge under an overhang, a full-grown iguana holding a footpath in the sun, and a bank of limestone undercut by green water with jungle growing straight out of the top of it.

The resort runs eco boat tours through the mangrove, and there are cenotes inside the community. If you have read my piece on Banyan Tree, the wildlife argument is the same argument, because it is the same water. The difference is that Fairmont’s lagoon frontage is longer and more of it is public: docks, stair landings, decks that end over the water, all of them walkable rather than attached to somebody’s villa.

Pools, and the beach club that reset the property

The main pool is a linked series of sections stepping down across limestone terraces and lawn, with a stone swim-up bar under a shingled pyramid roof at one end and enough loungers and canvas umbrellas that the towel-on-the-chair economy never gets going. It is a family pool, unambiguously, and it is very good at being one.

The bigger change is Maykana, the beach club Fairmont opened in September 2022 at the end of a multi-million-dollar renovation. It brought five food and drink outlets to the sand at once — Brisas, Fuego, Aqua, the signature Gaia, and Cielo, an adults-only rooftop bar over the Caribbean — along with a beachfront pool, private cabanas and sunken fire pits. Before Maykana, the beach was the weakest part of a resort whose best material was inland. It is now a reason to book.

The beach itself is wide, white, and thoroughly furnished: rows of thatch palapas with sling loungers under them, a marked swimming area, and enough space between the rows that it does not feel like a lido. On the day I photographed it, the water was clear to the swim line.

Behind all of it sits the Fairmont Spa, a freestanding building the hotel puts at about 37,000 square feet, with roughly twenty treatment rooms, hydrotherapy pools and a Technogym-fitted gym.

Eating here

The list is long for a single property. La Laguna does Mexican over the water at La Isla; Tauro is the steakhouse; Bassano covers Italian; Café Maya is the thatch-roofed beach hut; Hix is the lobby bar and lounge; La Cantina and Las Olas handle drinks; and Maykana adds Brisas, Fuego, Aqua and Cielo on the sand.

The best room of the lot, on the evidence of my own photographs, is the lagoon deck: a shingle-roofed pavilion on pilings with red-painted chairs, woven pendant lamps and festoon lights strung over a hardwood terrace that ends in green water. It is the only dining room on the property that could not be anywhere else.

The service style is old-school in the way Fairmont still does well: a guacamole trolley wheeled to the table and made in front of you, with lime, tomato, cheese, coriander and a dish of chapulines beside it for anyone who wants them. Whole fish comes off the grill and onto the table more or less as it left it.

Then there is the all-inclusive question. Fairmont Mayakoba sells an optional all-inclusive package covering meals and drinks by the glass at participating outlets, and several booking channels now list the hotel under an “All Inclusive” name. The exclusions are the part to read: premium menu items, bottled wine, and breakfast at some restaurants sit outside it. A five-diamond resort with an all-inclusive tick-box is a genuinely unusual animal, and it is the clearest signal of how this property differs from its neighbours.

Lagoon side or beach side

	Lagoon and mangrove	Beach side
What you see	Mangrove at the railing, canal below	Garden, sand, open sky
Walk to the sea	Several minutes, or a buggy	Immediate; some casitas have their own stair
Wildlife	Constant — birds, iguanas, turtles	Occasional
Insects	Repellent, in warm months	Sea breeze helps
Sargassum exposure	You choose when to look	You see it from the room
Noise	Quiet; away from the pools	Closer to Maykana and the main pool
Best for	Couples, longer stays, second visits	Families, short stays, first visits

The counter-argument

Four hundred and one rooms is four hundred and one rooms. This is not a hideaway, and anyone arriving expecting the hush of Rosewood or the villa-per-guest privacy of Banyan Tree will spend the first day recalibrating. The lobby is a lobby. There are corridors. At peak season the main pool has children in it, which is the correct outcome for a resort with two kids’ clubs and entirely the wrong one if you booked for silence.

The all-inclusive option cuts both ways. It makes the bill predictable at a destination where dining costs are the usual complaint, and it also changes the room around you: a package that includes unlimited drinks does not attract the same guest as an à la carte one. If that matters to you, book room-only and eat where you like, including at the neighbouring resorts.

And the sargassum season applies here exactly as it does everywhere on this coast. Seaweed washes onto Caribbean-facing beaches along the Riviera Maya seasonally, heaviest from roughly late spring into early autumn. Mayakoba rakes and manages it; nobody can prevent it. A beach-side room in August is a room with a view of whatever the tide brought, and a lagoon casita is not.

What it costs

The Deluxe Casita is quoted all-inclusive for two, before a nightly room tax and a small per-guest environmental fee paid at the hotel.

Banyan Tree, next door, sits a clear tier above on rate. Fairmont is not competing there and is not trying to. It is the volume luxury option inside a compound of low-volume ones, and the gap is most of the reason to consider it.

Rates move hard by season here, with December to April carrying the premium and the summer months discounting against heat and seaweed.

Know before you go

Take a lagoon casita if you are two people and coming for the setting, and a beach-side room if you are travelling with children or coming for four nights or fewer. Pack repellent whichever side you land on, because the mangrove is the whole point and the mangrove has mosquitoes. Do the eco boat tour early in the day. Book Cielo for sunset if the adults-only rooftop is the kind of thing you want, and book it before you arrive. Walk the canal paths at least once at dusk, when the turtles and the iguanas are still out and the light is on the water. And if the all-inclusive package is on the table, price both versions before you commit — the sums are closer than you would expect, and only one of them lets you spend an evening eating at Rosewood.

Twenty years in, the Fairmont’s advantage is not novelty. It is the trees.