By Randy Redmon and Jesse Kirkham—

There was a time when one of the great pleasures of living in or visiting Huatulco was sitting down at a nice restaurant, ordering a good meal, having a couple of drinks and walking away from the table thinking, “Wow, that was a lot of food for very little money.”

Huatulco was never completely free of expensive restaurants, of course, but for many Canadians and Americans, the appeal was that even a good restaurant meal generally felt like a bargain compared with what they were accustomed to paying at home.

Lately, however, we’ve found ourselves looking at restaurant bills a little differently, not necessarily because the prices are outrageous, but because the gap between what we used to think of as “cheap” and what we are paying today seems to be getting smaller. Perhaps the easiest way to see that change is with a glass of wine.

Consider a restaurant selling a house wine for 150 pesos a glass. Depending on the exchange rate, that works out to roughly C$12 or US$9. Neither figure is particularly shocking when compared with a mid-range restaurant in Canada or the United States, especially when you remember that Canadian restaurant prices often have sales tax added after the menu price.

The question, then, isn’t really whether 150 pesos is expensive, but whether it still feels like the kind of value people have traditionally associated with Huatulco.

For many years, the favourable exchange rate helped make Huatulco feel exceptionally inexpensive to Canadians and Americans. A 300-peso dinner seemed like a bargain when your dollar bought a significant number of pesos. With the peso stronger against both the Canadian and U.S. dollars, those same peso prices translate into noticeably more money from a foreign visitor’s perspective.

A 1,000-peso restaurant bill is still 1,000 pesos, but it is also roughly C$81 or US$59 at today’s exchange rates. Add a bottle of wine, a couple of cocktails, dessert and a tip, and a dinner for two can reach 1,500 pesos or more without anyone feeling as though they went overboard.

That doesn’t necessarily make Huatulco expensive, particularly when a comparable dinner in Canada, the United States or Europe can easily cost more. It does, however, mean that Huatulco may not feel as incredibly cheap to a Canadian or American visitor as it once did.

Visitors adjust accordingly. A family staying in an Airbnb may make breakfast and lunch themselves and eat out less often, while a couple might buy a bottle of wine at the supermarket rather than order several glasses at dinner. Someone heading to the beach may fill a cooler rather than buying drinks and snacks throughout the day. Those choices make perfect financial sense, but collectively they can also affect the local businesses that depend on visitor spending.

This is where the conversation becomes more interesting than simply asking whether Huatulco restaurants are too expensive. The real question may be what value means to us now.

Huatulco has changed considerably over the years, and the restaurant scene is better and more diverse than it was when many of us first arrived. There are talented chefs, excellent seafood, international cuisine, interesting wine lists and restaurants offering experiences that simply weren’t available here years ago. That improvement comes with a price, and most of us understand that, but customers are also doing their own calculations.

If I spend 1,200 or 1,500 pesos on dinner, I don’t necessarily need it to be cheap; I need it to feel worthwhile. I want good food, good service, a pleasant atmosphere and, yes, a glass of wine that makes me glad I ordered it. That is really the difference between cheap and value: cheap is about price, while value is about what you get for the price.

Perhaps Huatulco is slowly making that transition. For years, one of the easiest ways to market a Mexican vacation was to say, “It’s beautiful, the weather is fantastic, and everything is cheap,” but perhaps that isn’t the best way to describe Huatulco anymore.

Huatulco may be becoming a value destination rather than a cheap destination, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. People will pay for quality, a memorable meal, good service and a beautiful setting when they feel that what they received was worth what they paid.

Huatulco’s appeal has never really been that everything is cheap. It has always been the combination of natural beauty, climate, culture, food, hospitality and a quality of life that offered exceptional value. Perhaps that’s what we should be protecting.

So the next time you sit down at a Huatulco restaurant and look at a 150-peso glass of wine, maybe the question isn’t whether it’s expensive, but something much simpler: Is it worth it?