The 15 Best Things to Do in Mexico City III (and Top Things to Avoid)
The 15 Best Things to Do in Mexico City (and Top Things to Avoid)
Diego Grandi/iStock
https://www.fodors.com/world/mexico-and-central-america/mexico/mexico-city/experiences/news/photos/best-things-to-do-in-mexico-city
PART III
Everything you need to know before your first visit to Mexico’s bustling capital city.
What surprises most first-time visitors is how wildly cosmopolitan and cool Mexico City is. There is indeed history in spades, from ancient temples to sculpture gardens on centuries-old university grounds, but there’s also a pulse of reinvention through new restaurants, parties, and art projects that keep the city forever fresh. You could spend a month there and barely nibble at its edges.
Mexico City is a world of a place with so many superlative and unique feats. It is North America’s largest metropolis with the region’s biggest urban park, for instance. It has influences from everywhere while being thoroughly rooted in Mexican traditions. The city’s azulejo-tiled buildings take me back to my travels in Europe, and the countless museums tickle my inner historian. As a boutique hotel lover, every mansion stay I spy in Roma makes me want to check in, and nothing pleases me more than charting a hunger-slaying course around its street food stalls.
Here’s my distilled guide to seeing the best of Mexico City—what to do, where to eat, the hotels worth checking into, and what to skip, so you can experience CDMX wholeheartedly.
PHOTO: NOEL HIGAREDA
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Must-Try Restaurants: Santo Spirito
WHERE: Roma Norte
In 2018, Mattia Bellucci, the owner of Santo Spirito in Antigua, Guatemala, traveled to Mexico City, fell for its charms, and decided to open a restaurant there. The CDMX outpost of his Italian establishment at Colima 152 is a delicious reservation for date night, anniversaries, or simply celebrating your first time in the Mexican capital. Romance lingers naturally in the soundtrack of clinking wine glasses and the layers of trailing foliage descending through the space. The restaurant is named after the Santo Spirito area of Florence, and these are Italian dishes you won’t soon forget and will never regret. Try the vodka gnocchi or the lasagne that’s presented in a frying pan. All pastas are homemade.
PHOTO: ABRAHAM KASSIN
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Best Budget Hotel: OYO Hotel Hidalgo
WHERE: Centro Histórico
To feel the buzz of the historic center, make OYO Hotel Hidalgo your base. The main selling point is that it’s mere steps from Alameda Central, Palacio de Bellas Artes, and Palacio Postal. The standard double and triple rooms here are simple but functional for under 120 USD per night. You’ll be encircled by metro stops (Bellas Artes, San Juan de Letrán, Juárez, Garibaldi y Lagunilla and the like) and you’ll have no shortage of nearby eateries and bars. Try Bósforo or Fábrica Cervecera Bucareli when in the mood to imbibe mezcal or beer.
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Best Boutique Hotel: La Valise Mexico City
WHERE: Roma Norte
Housed in a restored 1905 French-style mansion, La Valise Mexico City is a design-forward hotel that has been charming visitors since 2014. A member of Small Luxury Hotels, it has just eight rooms, and each has a story. The hotel has Mesoamerican-inspired art, a petite spa, king-sized beds draped in Egyptian cotton, and, in some suites, beds that glide onto private terraces for sleeping under the stars. Book the Cilene Suite or Polaris Suite if you’d like that rolling bed magic.
Beyond the hotel, curated experiences like mezcal tastings, hot air balloon rides over Teotihuacán, and guided architecture tours give you a richer taste of Mexico City.
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Best Luxury Hotel: Casa Polanco
WHERE: Polanco
For a stay at 19-room Casa Polanco, you arrive through a wrought-iron gate draped in greenery before being greeted by a lobby with soaring arches, green marble floors, and velvet seating that sets the tone for the experience to come. Throughout the house, artworks by celebrated Mexican artists hang alongside sculptural objets d’art curated with the care of a collector’s eye, and there are cozy communal spaces like a library with an honor bar. Rooms have 600-thread-count sheets, Bang & Olufsen speakers, and marble bathrooms stocked with custom toiletries from the local luxury perfumer Xinú. Many have balconies, and some (like the Lincoln Suite) have terraces large enough for an alfresco morning stretch.
Casa Polanco is right across from leafy Parque Lincoln and a stone’s throw from the luxury boutiques of Polanco, a neighborhood some call the Beverly Hills of Mexico City.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF AIRBNB
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Best Airbnb: Casa Tepeji
WHERE: Roma Sur
Casa Tepeji is an Airbnb guest favorite that sleeps eight in three bedrooms. The whole group will have space to breathe in not one but two living rooms. You’ll want to spend as much time as possible in the plant-filled patio, reading and resting after pounding the city’s pavements. The understated exterior of this house is in stark contrast to its interiors, curves, and lines that are worthy of an Architectural Digest spread. There’s something pretty to look at wherever you are, right down to the rooftop where the washer and dryer are tucked away.
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Best Airbnb: A Contemporary Roma Norte Studio
WHERE: Roma Norte
Beyond its coveted location, guests staying at this Roma Norte studio enjoy access to a rooftop pool with sun loungers, a sky bar, herb garden, and a co-working space with city views and ergonomic chairs. There is also a gym that has weights, Swiss balls, bikes, treadmills, and elliptical machines.
The apartment itself is contemporary and thoughtfully equipped with both an oven and microwave, a tall freestanding fridge, cubist art within, and a balcony to take in the outdoors. The studio is in the Icon Roma building, just five minutes on foot from Paseo de la Reforma’s Ángel de la Independencia and surrounded by some of the city’s best cafes, restaurants, and bars, including Handshake Speakeasy.
PHOTO: WITR/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Things to Know
Remember to stay hydrated and take things easy on your first visit. At 2,240 meters above sea level, Mexico City sits higher than many travelers expect.
Don’t forget that Mexico City is earthquake-prone. It bears scars from devastating quakes in 1985 and 2017, and locals know the drill, quite literally. Pay attention to evacuation routes and sirens, and if you feel an earthquake, follow the “drop, cover, and hold on” procedure when alone indoors or move to a designated safe area if advised by hotel staff or locals.
Lastly, if you plan to stay in upscale Polanco, you might feel sticker shock when you see that a cocktail, dinner menu, or shopping haul can carry New York or London price tags.
Expert warns hoteliers are not keeping up with the pace of AI change
Why avoiding tech adoption could come with a steep price
https://www.costar.com/article/150416828/expert-warns-hoteliers-are-not-keeping-up-with-pace-of-ai-change?
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — The hotel industry, just like all other types of businesses, is still in the early stages of navigating one of the biggest shifts in technology it's ever experienced.
Artificial intelligence is poised to touch just about every aspect of hospitality, said Michael Goldrich, founder and chief advisor for Vivander Advisors. He added the biggest mistake hoteliers can make now is dismissing that change or sitting idle while it happens around them.
"I went to this one hotel management group, and I ran them through a whole AI literacy program. ... They were like 'Oh, this is great. This is going to make us all so productive,'" he said during an interview at the recent Hotel Data Conference. "Everyone was excited. I went back a year later [and] nothing changed. Nobody was using it."
The cost of AI inaction will be steep for hotel companies, Goldrich said.
"It's sort of like when social media came along," he said. "You can wait to do it, but then by waiting, what you're doing is you're losing that learning time of setting that foundation and learning as the technology is evolving. But also, you're also losing maybe people on your team that say, 'Why aren't we doing something?' They might say We should go somewhere that is a little bit more forward-thinking."
Hoteliers should be particularly aware of how their properties are showing up in large-language models such as ChatGPT because those will increasingly become the top of the funnel, or perhaps the majority of the funnel, in the booking process, he said.
"Next year ... we might have agents do the full booking," he said, noting the pace of change for AI is notably faster than other important tech adoptions.
There's more than one way to build a hotel competitive set
Using more models creates a more holistic view
Hotel competitive sets are a traditional tool for revenue managers to help them see where their property fits in the market and among competitors. Hoteliers can go beyond their geographic areas, however, to get a different perspective of their hotel, which can be particularly useful for higher-end hotels that may not have many other direct competitors within a short distance. (Getty Images)
https://www.costar.com/article/1075283723/theres-more-than-one-way-to-build-a-hotel-competitive-set?
By Bryan Wroten
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — As with everything else, context is king when setting up a hotel's competitive set.
Comp sets are a long-standing tool for hotel revenue managers to figure out how their properties are performing relative to the market and the other hotels in the area. Just because the tool is old, however, doesn't mean hoteliers have to do it the same way every time.
When setting up a comp set, hoteliers typically include a set of four to six properties, said Hannah Smith, senior analyst at STR during the "Build better benchmarks" session at the 2026 Hotel Data Conference. They typically range plus or minus half a class from their own hotel. The properties are usually less than 2 miles from the subject property, and they have an average daily rate variance of about 16.4%.
This is the average comp set, but within the averages, there is a lot of variability, Smith said. Within the CoStar product, hoteliers can create as many comp sets as they want, and many are making diverse options.
Creating additional comp sets can help hoteliers define who they think they’re competitive with, she said.
“That’s where you may see less of that variation compared to what we see with performance comp sets,” she said.
The geographical size of a comp set will vary based on where the subject hotel is located as well as what type of hotel it is, Smith said. A midscale hotel will have many other hotels as potential competitors, but a luxury resort may have to expand its radius to 10, 20 or even 50 miles to find other hotels that are competitive.
The ADR range can also vary depending on the type of hotels being compared, with a wide range possible when looking at luxury hotels, she said.
“Again, you have a smaller set of hotels that you can compare against if you're a luxury property, so you're probably being a bit more flexible in who you're identifying based on that price point,” she said.
One of the older tools in figuring out comp sets was giving them different letter grades as a way to evaluate how close the comp set is to the subject property, Smith said. Those with “lower grades” are more dissimilar to the property, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t useful because they may provide other context.
“Those ones in the D’s and F’s, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad comp set,” she said. “It just means these are comp sets that are not evaluating what we’re grading for.”
About 65% of all the comp sets around the U.S. are running a revenue per available room index plus or minus 20% from the subject property, Smith said. That means the majority are fairly close in performance, but there are another 35% that are much further afield.
Hannah Smith, senior analyst at STR, explains at the 2026 Hotel Data Conference how using multiple different competitive sets can create a more complete view of a hotel relative to its market and competitors. (Bryan Wroten)
In a look at a sample of anonymized real comp sets, she said one shows a hotel with two comp sets. It’s a limited-service property in a top 25 U.S. hotel market, specifically in a downtown central business district. The first comp set is geographical, evaluating the immediate area around the hotel, while the second is hotel-class-based.
The first one includes many properties that are actually in a lower class than the subject property, and there’s a slight room count variance, she said.
“I think where you really start to understand the strategy of these comp sets is when you look at the RevPAR index,” she said. “That second comp set is 100% RevPAR index, so it's as comparable as you can get to that subject property. The top one: 73%.”
It’s not that one of these is a better fit than the other, because each serves a different purpose to the hotelier setting them up, Smith said. The first one here was the local comp set to better understand what’s happening in the immediate area, to understand what’s bringing travelers to the 0.3-mile radius around the subject hotel. The second one shows how other similar hotels are performing, even if they’re farther away.
In another example, an extended-stay hotel near an airport in a secondary market has two comp sets, she said. The first comp set has a wider radius of about 8.5 miles while the second is tighter. The first has all properties in the second class — extended-stay hotels — while in the second, there’s only one other hotel in the same class.
One is a comp set helping the hotelier understand what’s happening in the immediate market around the airport while the other looks at the other extended-stay properties the subject hotel is competing against in the overall market, she said.
Smith said she came up with four ideas of what a comp set can do and what purpose it can serve. The first is the local comp set to help hoteliers understand what’s happening directly around their hotel. The next is a key performance index comp set that aligns as closely as possible with their property. Another is service level that looks at the operating structure, while the last looks at amenities offered.
“Using the four of these comp sets together gives you a more holistic look at what all of the aspects of my operation are doing,” she said. “How successful are they at the different parts of the business?”
Another option is to set up comp sets using the data set hoteliers are actually using, she said. A top-line performance comp set may not be the best comp set when looking at day-of-week swings, and the monthly data may look great, but it might not align with the actual strategy of the hotel and how it targets a particular customer base.
“You have this top-line comp set basically running at 100% index of each of the KPIs, but when you look at the comp sets that are built for other purposes, that are built to align on day-of-week strategy, that are built to align off profitability, they’re not always going to get you that 100% RevPAR index, but they're going to give you more information about your strategy than just that top line,” she said.
There are other options out there, too, Smith said. A hotel with higher occupancy on the weekends than it does on weekdays didn’t see comp sets align with it until the comp sets looked directly at hotels with similar occupancy patterns.
“If you take one thing away, it’s that one single comp set isn’t necessarily going to be the answer to all of the ways that you’re benchmarking,” she said. “So, let’s rethink what a comparable hotel is.”
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