Mexico Wedding Photography Before and After the Pandemic: How Everything Shifted

Mexico never closed to international weddings. That is the fact that shaped everything that followed. While Italy locked down, while the Caribbean islands fluctuated between open and restricted, while Canadian domestic weddings navigated provincial public health orders, Mexico stayed open. And the industry flooded in.

The Mexico I photographed in 2019 and the Mexico I am photographing in 2022 are related but not identical markets. Here is what I have actually seen change — region by region.

The Riviera Maya: Volume, Pressure, and the Move Away from Resorts

The Riviera Maya absorbed an enormous amount of displaced demand during 2020 and 2021. Couples who had planned European weddings and could not travel rebooked to Cancún-area resorts. Couples who had planned Cabo weddings and wanted an east-coast option. Couples from the northeastern United States who could drive to Miami and fly south. The result was a market that ran hot through 2021 and into 2022 — venues booked further out, photographer availability more constrained, vendor prices elevated.

But the interesting shift is not in volume — it is in what couples are asking for within the region. Pre-pandemic, the dominant Riviera Maya wedding was resort-beach: a gazebo on the sand, an all-inclusive package, 80 to 120 guests in formal attire. That model has not disappeared, but a growing proportion of couples who booked through my inquiry pipeline in 2022 are specifically asking to move away from it. Cenote ceremonies. Jungle locations. Boutique properties in Akumal and Puerto Morelos rather than the Cancún hotel zone. The pandemic gave people two years to scroll Instagram and Pinterest and look critically at what they actually wanted — and a lot of them decided they did not want the resort beach photograph everyone else already had.

Tulum: Discovery, Overcrowding, and Recalibration

Tulum was already on the trajectory toward over-saturation before COVID. The pandemic accelerated it dramatically — when international travel reopened, the couples who had spent lockdown discovering Tulum's aesthetic (the boho-jungle hotels, the cenotes, the ruins) arrived in force. By late 2021 and into 2022, Tulum was genuinely overwhelmed in a way that the pre-pandemic market had been approaching but had not yet reached. Cenote bookings that required a few weeks' advance planning in 2019 require months in 2022. The Tulum ruins photography window at dawn — which I use specifically because there are no tourists yet — is getting narrower.

What this has done, interestingly, is push more discerning couples toward the surrounding region: toward Bacalar's blue lagoon to the south, toward less-trafficked cenotes in the Yucatán interior, toward Sian Ka'an's biosphere reserve. The couples who want Tulum's aesthetic without Tulum's crowds are finding it 30 to 90 minutes away, and those locations are producing extraordinary photographs precisely because no one else has found them yet.

Los Cabos: Desert Luxury, Elevated

Los Cabos entered the pandemic already trending upward — several new ultra-luxury properties had opened in the years before 2020, and the market was increasingly competing with the Caribbean for high-net-worth destination wedding clients. What the pandemic did was accelerate that positioning decisively. The couples I am booking in Cabo in 2022 have higher average budgets than the pre-pandemic Cabo couples, are booking with longer lead times, and are specifically requesting the desert landscape — the Baja rock formations, the Sea of Cortez coastline, the desert interior — as an active element of the photography rather than a backdrop.

The desert golden hour in Cabo at the end of the dry season is some of the most visually extraordinary light I work in anywhere in Mexico, and more couples are aware of it now than were in 2019. That awareness is driving better photographs.

San Miguel de Allende: The Pandemic Revelation

San Miguel was one of the locations that benefited most clearly from the pandemic's forced redirection of attention. Couples who had never considered Mexico's colonial interior — who would previously have said "Mexico" and thought "beach" — found San Miguel while their European plans were on hold and understood immediately that it was something different. The Parroquia, the rooftop terraces, the cobblestone streets: San Miguel photographs more like Spain or Portugal than like Cancún, and that comparison opened the market to a category of couple who had not previously been looking at Mexico at all.

I photographed two San Miguel weddings in 2022 for couples who explicitly told me they had been planning Italian weddings and pivoted during the pandemic. Both sets of images are among my strongest Mexico work. The city rewards the lens in ways that are difficult to articulate and impossible to fake.

Oaxaca: The Slow Discovery That Accelerated

Oaxaca was already on a slow trajectory of discovery as a destination wedding location before COVID — but slowly. The pandemic sped up the cultural discovery of Oaxaca as a travel destination generally (the mezcal culture, the food scene, the textile traditions were all subjects of significant international press coverage during 2020-2021), and that general visibility translated directly into wedding inquiries. In 2022 I am getting Oaxaca inquiries from couples who would not have known how to spell the city's name in 2019.

The cantera stone, the Valley of the Tlacolula, the haciendas of the surrounding valleys — Oaxaca offers a visual density and cultural specificity that I find more exciting to photograph than almost any other location in Mexico. And unlike San Miguel, which is increasingly visible and increasingly priced accordingly, Oaxaca's destination wedding market is still early enough that the best locations are available and the vendor network is still undercut by demand.

What Mexico 2022 Looks Like

Busier than 2019, more expensive than 2019, more aesthetically diversified than 2019. The all-inclusive resort beach wedding is still the dominant model numerically, but its share of the interesting work — the work I am most proud of — is shrinking relative to the inland, boutique, cenote, and colonial alternatives that couples are increasingly choosing. The pandemic showed people that Mexico was more than a beach destination, and that lesson is sticking.