TripAdvisor Inside™ is a travel wiki. We can all now read, write and edit online travel guides on thousands of destinations around the world. There are no doubt other examples, but TripAdvisor are the big players.

Travellers – and residents – can now collaborate to write travel guides together. One person starts a topic, like “Cancún: Travelling during Hurricane Season” Another person adds to it. Another fixes a couple of typos. Another adds more to it. And shortly you have a travel topic written from the collective wisdom of dozens of people.

Better than an outdated guidebook.

The Cancún Palace is a mess; still looming over the beach, imposing an ugly and noisy backdrop to the festivities. Nevertheless, the beach appears to be back to its glorious self.

The article also includes some hotel updates…

• the 515-room Westin Resort & Spa reopened July 7th, but still has rooms being worked on
• the 365-room Ritz-Carlton Cancun is due to reopen in mid-September
• the 450-room J.W. Marriott Cancun Resort & Spa has 235 rooms open. All are due back by the end of August
• the 450-room Marriott Casa Magna Cancun Resort has 200 rooms open; all are due back by the end of August
• the 300-room Hyatt Regency Cancun is due back in November

Laura quotes me in her article published today, although my opinions are rather more rounded than they might appear from the morsel in Laura’s piece.

This morning, whether from neglect or design, the beaches were positively filthy. It was as though Fonatur [the Mexican tourism development agency] has given up on cleaning the beaches, which were clogged with huge bundles of seaweed and other detritus.

It seemed as though the Park Royal had attempted a small cleanup, but it could also be the meter to meter and a half ’shelf’ in front of the property keeping the seaborne garbage off the beach.

The beaches in front of Le Meridien and Ritz Carlton have lost their shelves and the sea has deposited what appears to be about five meters of additional sand.

The beaches themselves were as filthy as the rest. Were I a paying guest in Cancún, I’d be upset. 

The “ecological restoration area” constructed in front of the Cancún Palace, which I photographed a fortnight ago, is gone, obliterated by the ongoing demolition and reconstruction of the Palace. One wonders what the point was in the first place. There are now huge mounds of sand obstructing the beach south of the Palace (pictured; view larger version). The project itself has worn out its welcome; despite the steady stream of trucks, dirt and noise, there’s no visible progress.

The public access to Playa Ballenas was covered by the smell of dying vegetation and fish. Between the smell, the continuing onslaught of construction noise and dust from the Cancun Palace project and the really unruly surf today, we fled back to the comfort of our pool.

Another photo looking north from Playa Ballenas.

Photo courtesy of Cancún Visitors Bureau (Oficina de Visitantes y Convenciones de Cancún), with additional thanks to Manuel Cuevas and Sandra Ibarra of William H. Coleman Inc.

While the hotel is being re-developed, an "Ecological Restoration Area" has been planted at the back of the beach. A ‘beautification’ project really.

• View a larger version of  Mel’s photo of the beach.

Mel adds that it appears the beach cleaning is restricted to hotels that are open; the area in front of Le Meridien (the green-roofed building in the background) is pristine, while the area next door in front of the Ritz Carlton is laden with seaweed and junk.

Another photo of the ecological restoration area, and another.

"Jan de Nul is getting ready to pack its bags" Gabriela Rodríguez Gálvez, Secretary of Tourism for Quintana Roo state (pictured) declared yesterday.

She added that the last recycled sand was being flushed onto a 70m stretch of beach in front of the hotel El Pueblito, the only section of the 11.7km (7-mile) strip which did not get its promised measure of 25m first time round.

While the two dredgers disappear over the horizon, Belgian maritime engineering company Jan de Nul may yet win the contract to maintain the replenished beach.

Just enough, never too much

The trustees of the beach recovery will announce phase two of the project when they next meet on Tuesday next week. While hoteliers insist on a further extension of the beach out to 60m, the likelihood is a scaled down operation to consolidate what they now have.

Photo: courtesy El Diario de Yucatán

Many thanks to Steve Wright of CancunCare.com who took this image of the outfall pipe in position on Playa Delfines, ready (presumably) to start pumping sand today.

Here’s another photo… taken just north of El Pueblito and looking south towards the Westin and Punta Nizuc.

Insurance salesmen would probably squeeze their way into the top five in most polls of the least respected, least trusted professions – certainly where I come from. They are the perennial bad guys.

Now, I am not about to leap to their defence, but, all the same, while hoteliers may baulk as premiums skyrocket and insurers drag their feet to settle their dues, I believe they should share the blame as the cycle of build and bust in such a vulnerable location shows no sign of letting up.

On March 28th, I flagged Sean Mattson’s well-timed questioning of building standards in hurricane-prone cities, like Cancún.

Cancún’s Hotel Zone is a narrow sandspit and everyone wants to squeeze the most out of their multi-million dollar investment in real estate, so they go as close to the ocean as possible, and as high as regulations allow.

In a move calculated to put the wind up the current, largely Mexican insurers, the Cancún Hotel Association announced it may try some fancy footwork of its own and enter into negotiations with foreign insurance companies on behalf of its fed up members. 

But it’s a similar story in other Wilma-affected areas. Residents in the Florida Keys for example, faced with spiralling insurance costs, are also kicking up a stink.

I certainly do have some sympathy for restaurateurs. According to Kit Bing Wong Ho, representative of the sector in Cancún, after a lean six months, and with this year’s hurricane season looming, as few as 10 per cent of bars and restuarants in the resort will be able to afford the hike in premiums demanded by insurers. So most small businesses will be without cover come the start of the hurricane season on June 1st.

Before Wilma, the policy for a small restaurant cost about $30,000 pesos (approx. $2,700 US dollars) a year. It now costs something like $210,000 ($19,000 US dollars).

This year, an "average-sized" hotel in Cancún will need to fork out $2 million US dollars for cover.

Insurance companies said they relied on established disaster recovery plans in response to last year’s record hurricane season. But what about the longer term? Little has been said about where hotels were stacked in the first place – and continue to be built: right on top of the dunes.

Just as King Canute commanded the waves to "go back", so as to demonstrate to his overly deferential courtiers the limits of a king’s powers, surely hotel developers must take remedial action.

Wilma only speeded up a process that had been taking place for years. The back-to-back construction of dozens of hotels right on the high water mark of Cancún’s flagship beach left a fragile ecosystem dangerously out of balance. The changing intensity of tropical storms makes the whole region still more vulnerable.

Shortly after Hurricane Wilma, the Financial Times quoted Andres Chacon, an environmental engineer sent to Cancún by the government’s environment ministry in the wake of the storm.

"It was a bad idea to build the hotels on the coastal sand dunes," Chacon said.

Now that the sand has been put back (the beach recovery project is almost complete), the next step ought to be to stimulate the regeneration of the dunes to prevent the beach from continuing to drift away. But who knows whether this will happen.

Can we learn from past lessons? Maybe.

Then again, there’s a saying in the Spanish-speaking world: el hombre es el único animal que tropieza dos veces con la misma piedra ("man is the only animal to trip twice over the same stone").

High premiums or even the phased withdrawal of insurance for properties built in high-risk areas may ensure that only the foolish would then build their house on sand.

Or would it? Discuss…

Unrepentants flock to the beaches over Semana Santa (Holy Week) and Christmas, something I remember well when I lived on the Pacific coast of Michoacán.

Cancún will fill up this week, particularly from Thursday to Sunday. Many will bus in from neighbouring states, filling hotel rooms and the cinder-block rooms of friends and relatives in equal measure.

All in all, it’s an especially bankable time for taquerias and coctelerías and smaller restaurants in el centro.

Hotel occupancy and business fall off quickly the day after Easter, the end of high season.

These guys sure work fast.

This stretch of the beach was wiped out by Hurricane Wilma. You can see what little remained in this photo taken just last week by Nancy McElroy, who is, alas, now back home in Michigan.

• View a slideshow of Jim Wehrle’s before and after photos from April 4th and 5th.