Hotels in Santa Marta are citing energy costs as the reason for price increases, but the pattern suggests a deeper problem: infrastructure that was never designed for current tourism volume. Whether operators absorb costs or pass them straight through determines who pays—guests, staff, or the grid itself.
How much have hotel prices actually gone up in Santa Marta?
The honest answer: it depends who you ask and when you book.
Hotels in Santa Marta’s tourist zones are raising rates, but the increases are not uniform. A mid-range property in Rodadero that charged 180,000 pesos in 2023 is now asking 220,000 for the same room in high season. That is a 22% jump. Some boutique places in the historic centre went from 150,000 to 200,000 overnight—a 33% increase with no corresponding upgrade to service or facilities.
The pattern matters more than the percentage. Properties with long-term contracts and stable occupancy absorbed some costs and raised prices 10-15%. Places that operate month-to-month, with high vacancy in low season, are passing everything through and then adding margin on top.
Energy costs are the public explanation. But when you run a place here for more than one season, you notice that price increases arrive faster than utility bills do.
What is driving energy costs higher for coastal hotels right now?
The Caribbean coast pays more for electricity than the interior does. Always has.
Residential rates in Santa Marta run higher than in Bogotá or Medellín, and commercial rates—what hotels pay—are worse. The grid here is older, distances are longer, and losses in transmission are high. When national energy costs rise, the coast feels it first and hardest.
According to reporting from El Tiempo, hoteliers in Santa Marta are warning that higher energy consumption charges could make lodging more expensive and threaten employment. The concern is real, but most hotels here were built without serious energy planning.
Air conditioning runs all day in empty rooms because no one installed occupancy sensors. Pools are heated when they do not need to be. Kitchens use equipment from the 1990s that pulls twice the power of a modern unit. When the bill arrives, it is called a crisis. But it was a design problem from the start.
Are hotels absorbing any of these costs or just passing them on?
Some are. Most are not.
A property that runs tight margins and employs fifteen people has no room to absorb a 30% jump in the power bill. They raise prices or they close. That is not opportunism—it is survival.
But there are places in Santa Marta pulling 80% occupancy year-round, with healthy cash flow, that raised prices the moment energy costs became a headline. They did not wait to see the actual bill. They did not look for efficiency improvements first. They passed it through and added a margin because the story gave them cover.
The test is simple: ask the operator what they tried before raising the rate. If the answer is nothing, you know what you are dealing with.
What happens to local employment when hotels cut costs instead of raising prices?
Hours get cut first. Then positions.
A housekeeper who worked six days a week is down to four. A cook who had a contract is now on call. The fix is presented as temporary, but temporary here has a way of becoming permanent.
When a hotel raises prices and keeps staff, the guest pays more but the local economy holds. When a hotel holds prices and cuts labour, the cost lands on people who cannot pass it anywhere else. They absorb it in the form of less income, which means less spending in Minca, in Taganga, in the neighbourhoods where tourism workers actually live.
The El Tiempo report frames this as a risk, not a reality. But anyone running a place here knows: the cuts already started.
Is this a Santa Marta problem or a Caribbean coast infrastructure problem?
It is a coast problem that shows up loudest in Santa Marta because this is where the volume is.
The grid in Magdalena and La Guajira was not designed for the hotel density that exists now. Twenty years ago, Santa Marta had a fraction of the rooms it has today. The infrastructure grew slowly. Tourism grew fast.
Cartagena has the same issue, but more money has moved through there, so some properties invested in backup generation and efficiency retrofits. Santa Marta is behind. Not because operators here are less capable, but because margins are thinner and capital is harder to access.
When the system is under strain, the weakest parts fail first. Right now that is the small and mid-range properties that do not have cash reserves to install solar, upgrade HVAC, or ride out a bad season.
The question for anyone staying here or running a property here is the same: do you want a coast full of all-inclusive resorts that can absorb cost shocks because they are backed by foreign capital, or do you want a mix that includes locally-owned places that reflect the actual culture of the region? Because the latter cannot survive an infrastructure problem that gets blamed on them as a management problem.
What does this mean if you are booking a hotel in Santa Marta?
Prices will stay high. Some will go higher.
If you are booking for 2024 or 2025, expect to pay 15-25% more than you would have paid two years ago for the same category of property. That is the floor, not the ceiling.
The places that will hold rates are the ones that already invested in efficiency and are not operating hand-to-mouth. They exist, but you have to look for them. A hotel that lists energy-saving measures on its site is not virtue signalling—it is telling you they planned for this.
If you are choosing between two properties at the same price and one mentions solar panels, occupancy-sensor AC, or LED lighting, that is the one that is less likely to hit you with a surprise surcharge mid-stay or cut breakfast service halfway through your booking.
What does this mean if you are running a hotel on the coast?
You cannot wait for the grid to improve. It will not, not on a timeline that helps you.
The operators who survive this are the ones who treat energy as a capital problem, not an operating expense. That means financing a solar install even when cash flow is tight. It means replacing kitchen equipment that works but pulls too much power. It means measuring consumption by room, by day, and finding the waste before it finds you.
If your answer to rising costs is to raise prices and change nothing else, you are buying time, not solving the problem. And in a market where guests compare prices across fifty properties in ten minutes, time is the one thing you do not have much of.
The other option is to absorb it and cut labour. That works until it does not. You can run a hostel with two people. You cannot run a hotel.
Frequently asked questions
Why is electricity so expensive on Colombia's Caribbean coast?
The Caribbean coast grid is older, transmission distances are longer, and energy losses are higher than in the interior. When national electricity costs increase, coastal cities like Santa Marta and Cartagena feel the impact more severely because the infrastructure was not built to handle current demand efficiently.
Do all-inclusive resorts use more energy than independent hotels?
Yes, significantly. All-inclusive resorts run air conditioning, kitchens, pools, and amenities at full capacity regardless of occupancy. Independent hotels can scale usage to actual guest count. The difference in consumption per guest can be 40-60%, but large resorts often have capital to invest in efficiency measures that smaller properties cannot afford.
Are there hotels in Santa Marta using solar or alternative energy?
Some are, but not many. A handful of boutique properties and eco-lodges in the hills around Santa Marta have installed solar panels, but most hotels in the main tourist zones still rely entirely on the grid. The upfront cost of solar is high, and financing is difficult for small operators, so adoption is slow despite long-term savings.
What percentage of hotel operating costs is typically energy?
For a mid-range hotel in Santa Marta running air conditioning, energy typically accounts for 12-18% of operating costs. For all-inclusive resorts with pools, kitchens and 24-hour amenities, it can reach 25-30%. When electricity rates jump 30-40%, that percentage can move enough to erase profit margins entirely on some bookings.
Will hotel prices in Santa Marta go back down when energy costs stabilize?
Unlikely. Once a rate increase is accepted by the market, hotels rarely roll it back. Energy costs may stabilize, but labour, food, and maintenance costs continue to rise. The properties that raised prices will keep them unless occupancy drops sharply enough to force a correction, which has not happened yet.
Sources
Honey lives in Minca, in the Sierra Nevada. What is here comes from living and working in the territory these pages cover, not from visiting it for a week. Where something is seasonal or has changed, the text says so.