Terms of Service

Huatulco.app is an information service about Huatulco, Oaxaca: a catalogue of places, beaches, events and practical facts, with tools to save them, plan a trip, ask questions and send some businesses a reservation request.

Nor are we a travel agency, a tour operator or an emergency service. We do not sell tours, we do not charge you for asking for a reservation, and we do not dispatch ambulances.

Some restaurants and businesses receive reservation requests through the guide. A request is a message we pass on to the business: the business confirms it, offers you another time or declines it, and there is a reservation only once the business confirms it. Asking costs you nothing in the app and we charge the business no commission for it. Section 9 has the details.

What we do is gather information and present it as well as we can. That part we do answer for, on the terms in this document.

• Anyone may read the guide, with no account.
• To create an account you must be at least 13. If you are between 13 and 17, you need the permission of a parent or guardian, who accepts these terms with you and is responsible for how your account is used.
• If you are under 13, do not create an account: you may read the guide under the supervision of a parent or guardian.
• In-app purchases — the trip passes and the concierge refill — are made with the phone’s Apple or Google account and are subject to its family controls, such as asking the responsible adult to approve a purchase.
• If you use the service on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

• Give accurate details and keep them up to date.
• Your password is yours: do not share it and do not let anyone else use your account.
• You are responsible for what happens from your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
• If you think someone has got into it, change the password and write to us straight away.
• You can close your account whenever you like from Delete my account.

Use the service for what it is: finding things out, planning your trip, saving places, writing to the concierge, sending a business a reservation request and — if you run a business here — managing your listing. Share links to our pages freely.

• Extracting the catalogue in bulk or by automated means, or reusing it to build a competing product.
• Accessing by automated means, evading rate limits, or forging usage events — analytics feed the public ranking and the dashboards businesses pay for.
• Claiming a business you do not represent, or impersonating another person or us.
• Uploading photographs you did not take or have no rights to, or images of identifiable people without their consent.
• Posting content that is unlawful, defamatory, discriminatory, sexual involving minors, or that harasses or threatens anyone.
• Writing fake reviews, your own or paid for, or manipulating a competitor’s rating.
• Sending false reservation requests, requests in someone else’s name without their permission, or requests with contact details that are not yours.
• Trying to reach other people’s data, probing for vulnerabilities, or interfering with how the service runs.
• Decompiling or reverse-engineering the app, except so far as the law expressly permits.
• Using the service for any unlawful purpose.

If you find a vulnerability, write to us before making it public and do not exploit it beyond what is needed to demonstrate it.

The design, the editorial writing, the guides and the arrangement of the catalogue are ours or our licensors’. Some of the data comes from open sources — OpenStreetMap and Open-Meteo among them — used under licences that require attribution, which is why the footer carries it and why it must not be stripped from copies.

What you upload stays yours. By submitting a photograph, a review, a report or any other content, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, sub-licensable to our hosting providers, to store it, reproduce it, adapt it technically (crop, resize, compress) and display it within the service and in promotion of the service itself.

By submitting it you confirm it is yours or that you have the right to submit it, and that it infringes nobody’s rights. We review photographs before publishing them, and we may refuse or take down any content.

If you believe something published here infringes your copyright, write to us identifying the work, where it appears and why, and we will deal with it.

A listing is not a recommendation, a certification or an endorsement. That a place appears means we recorded it; it does not mean we inspected it, or that we stand behind its quality, hygiene, safety or prices.

Some of the information is written by the business itself from its own dashboard. We do not verify every claim an owner makes about their premises.

If you are the owner and want to correct your listing, claim it; the terms are in the Business terms.

Reservation requests. At some businesses you can ask for a reservation from their page or from your trip. We pass your request on to the business — the date, the time, the party size, your name, your notes and your phone if you give it — and the business decides: it confirms, offers you another time or declines. Until it confirms there is no reservation, and we do not guarantee that it will answer or that the table will be there. Asking costs you nothing in the app and we charge the business no commission for it. If your plans change, let the business know. What happens to your data is in the Privacy notice.

When you telephone, message on WhatsApp, follow a link from a listing or a business confirms your request, the arrangement is between you and that business. Price, availability, cancellation terms and performance are theirs. Any complaint about a tour that did not run, a table that was not there or a charge that does not add up goes to whoever sold it to you or confirmed the reservation.

That does not leave you without recourse: against that business you keep every consumer right you have, including going to PROFECO.

The guide links out to sites we do not control — a hotel’s own site, a map, an official page. We do not answer for their content, their privacy practices or whether they keep existing.

Some of those links lead to our partners’ booking sites — tours, accommodation, car hire, travel insurance, eSIMs — and are affiliate links: if you buy there, that site pays us a commission. Whatever you buy there you buy from that site, at its prices and on its terms, and its own privacy notice governs it.

Maps use OpenStreetMap data and Mapbox tiles. The distances we show are straight-line estimates, not driving routes, and they do not always reflect whether a road exists, is paved, or is passable today.

Your device’s location is used only when you tap a "near me" control, and only to sort a list by distance. The Privacy notice explains it.

This is a guide to the real world, and the real world changes without telling us. We say it bluntly because it is the most useful warning in the document:

• Opening hours, prices and menus are published by the businesses or come from public sources. They change, they close for the season, they put prices up, and they do not always tell us.
• Transport, taxi fares and options from the airport are indicative and get negotiated or adjusted on the spot.
• Beaches: surf, current and safety change from one hour to the next. Always obey the flags and the lifeguards, not a screen.
• Events and cruise arrivals move and get cancelled.
• Weather comes from an external forecasting service and is a forecast, not an official warning. Official warnings come from the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional and Protección Civil.
• Emergency numbers we maintain with real care, but a number can go out of date. In an emergency dial 911 directly, without relying on this app.

Confirm anything that matters with whoever provides it before you travel, pay or count on it. If you see something wrong, report it from the listing — that is how it gets fixed.

The concierge and the planner run on third-party models, can be wrong, and are no substitute for emergency services, a doctor, a lawyer, an authority, a tour operator, or official weather and sea warnings. Before anything is sent for the first time we ask your permission to send Google what you type and your trip details; without it nothing is sent, and saying no does not stop you using the rest of the app. The whole picture — what is sent, how your permission is recorded, who keeps it, for how long — is in the AI notice, which forms part of these terms.

• Current prices and what each tier includes are shown at the point of purchase. We do not repeat them here so that the two cannot contradict each other.
• In-app purchases are processed by Apple on iOS and Google Play on Android, under their own terms. Payment details never touch our servers.
• A trip pass gives access for the period shown when you buy it and does not renew itself: when it ends, you are not charged anything more.
• A concierge message top-up can be bought only by the person who bought the trip pass, and only while that pass is in force; if you travel on a companion seat on someone else’s pass, only the person who bought the pass can buy the top-up. It is attached to that pass: it adds concierge messages to that pass and to nothing else. Messages you do not use end with the pass: they do not move to another pass, including when you upgrade to a higher tier.
• A purchase is bound to your account: you have it on any device where you sign in with that account. Delete the account and you lose access to whatever you bought.
• Purchased access is personal and non-transferable, apart from any companion seats the product itself lets you add.
• We may change prices and plan contents going forward. A change never alters what you already bought for the period you already paid for.

• If you bought on iOS or Android, the store handles refunds — Apple or Google, under their policies. We cannot refund a payment we never processed.
• Passes and top-ups are sold only inside the app, through the App Store or Google Play: nothing is sold on the web.
• If something you bought did not work as we described it, write to us even though the store handles the refund: we want to know, and we will help you ask for it.
• If we close or suspend your paid access without you having breached these terms, we refund the unused portion.
• None of this cuts down the rights the Federal Consumer Protection Law gives you that cannot be waived.

When the AI concierge mentions a sponsored place, we instruct it to mark it “(sponsored)” and to recommend it only if it fits what you asked: paying lifts a business in what the concierge reads, but it does not buy a recommendation. If you ever see a paid slot without its label, in a list or in a concierge answer, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

What is not for sale: our editorial picks, and the order of results when you sort them by distance, rating or popularity, to which no boost for payment is added. Popularity reflects the real visits each listing receives, including those that come from promotion.

On cruise days, “Near the pier” lists the places within a walk of the pier by walking minutes; those that pay for a place appear above that list, labelled “Sponsored”.

We do not show third-party ad-network advertising.

You can stop using the service and delete your account whenever you like, with no explanation owed to us.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that puts other people or the service at risk, or where the law requires it. Unless doing so would compromise an investigation or is legally barred, we will tell you why and you can respond. Where the breach is minor and fixable, we warn before closing.

We do what is reasonable to keep the service up, but we do not promise uninterrupted availability. There is maintenance, there are provider failures, and there are network outages. Parts of it work offline in the native app; others need the internet by definition, such as the concierge.

We may also change, limit or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you paid for, section 15 applies.

The service is provided as it is. So far as the law allows, we do not warrant that the information is free of errors, that the service fits a particular purpose of yours, or that it will run without interruption.

We do warrant what the law does not let us exclude, and we do not attempt to exclude it: that the service matches how we describe and advertise it, and every warranty the Federal Consumer Protection Law grants that cannot be waived.

We answer for harm caused by our own breach. We do not answer for what the businesses, operators, carriers or photographers you deal with do or fail to do, for decisions you take on information that changed and that you did not confirm, or for indirect loss or lost profit.

Where we are liable for your use of the service, and apart from the cases in the next paragraph, that liability is capped at the total you have paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to it.

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Mexican States.

Write to us first: almost everything is settled in an email. If you are a consumer and we cannot agree, you can go to the Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor (PROFECO), whose jurisdiction we do not seek to exclude or limit.

For anything that has to be decided by a court, you may choose between the courts where you live and those where we are domiciled. We do not impose a foreign court on you and we do not ask you to give up your own.

This page carries a version and an effective date. When the text changes, the version goes up.

• A substantial change is shown to you inside the app and we ask you to accept it before carrying on. If you do not accept, it is not imposed on you: you can stop using the service and delete your account, and if you had paid for something, section 15 applies.
• A wording correction that does not change the meaning moves only the last number and does not interrupt you.

We do not apply changes retroactively to what has already happened.

For anything to do with these terms, your account or a purchase: