Mérida, Yucatán — The Hotel Palacio Maya became famous long before it opened.
Construction, starting and stopping without permits, was halted several times, leaving a five-story hulk on Calle 62.
The owner hung a protest banner on the hotel at one point, protesting his treatment from the city. Other times, passers-by just saw an apparently abandoned, boarded-up and never used building.
Either way, it made for a very public squabble.
Battles with the Urban Development Directorate and public notary Fernando Vales Tenreiro, whose office is next to the hotel, dragged on with investor Roman Stanislaw Kociankowski Sopora.
Now the hotel has been open for months and the city has issued it the permits it needs, in that order.
The 63-room Hotel Palacio Maya is booking online. A standard room is $37-$50 on Expedia, and on Facebook, as of Tuesday afternoon it has 11 five-star reviews.
And its location puts it a stone’s throw away from the new convention center, something that wasn’t anticipated when construction began years ago.
Another small hotel that had problems is the one that is built at the main entrance of the IMSS T-1 hospital in Col. Industrial.
This hotel, according to Urban Development Director Aref Karam Espósitos, received a construction permit for a two-level building, but ended up building four stories.
The city shut it down for several months until it qualified for four-story permit.
Now it is in the final phase of construction, it will soon open to the public. It is the neighborhood’s first hotel built for the hospital’s visitors.
Mérida had 8,100 hotel rooms in 2016, and by the end of this year it will have just over 11,000.
The Urban Development Directorate has authorized licenses for 17 new hotels, eight of which are already under construction. Seven existing hotels are expanding or renovating.
Source: Diario de Yucatán
