In 2026, pick the best beach before choosing the best resort
With sargassum becoming a much bigger and more persistent issue across the Caribbean, choosing a great resort doesn't necessarily mean you're choosing a great beach. You can spend $5,000+ on a beautiful resort and then discover that the beach in front of it is covered in sargassum and the smell from decomposing seaweed makes you want to stay at the pool instead.
Tulum is a good example. It can be one of the more heavily affected areas in the Riviera Maya (Mexico), while some beaches farther north around Cancun can be considerably better at the same time. Costa Mujeres, Playa Mujeres, Playa Langosta and Playa Caracol in Northern Cancun are some areas that have generally been more naturally protected. The difference can be pretty significant even within the same region.
So my approach now would be:
1. Check the actual conditions on a website designed for beach transparency
2. Pick the beach first, based on the live imagery and user reports
3. Finally, find a resort on that stretch that fits your budget and standards.
I've been using Sargazo Watch for this because it lets you look at individual beaches in real time instead of treating an entire region as either “good” or “bad.”
You can open the map, filter the beaches, click on an individual beach and see the latest available conditions, including live cameras and dated photos. There are now more than 140 live cameras across the areas being monitored.
It also shows hotels/resorts on the map, so you can find a beach you like first and then see what accommodation options are nearby. Or you can simply use it to identify a few beaches and then do your normal Google research to find the resort that suits you.
I think this is becoming more important because sargassum isn't something you can reliably predict based only on the destination or the time of year anymore. Even neighboring beaches can look completely different.
Nothing would be worse than finding an amazing all-inclusive, spending thousands on the trip, and then discovering that the beach is unusable and you're spending the vacation at the pool while smelling decomposing sargassum.
I'd rather choose the beach first and the hotel second.