Visiting Puerto Vallarta During the Off Season

Can You Visit Puerto Vallarta at Any Time or Is there a “Best” Time?

One of the hallmarks of frequent travel is getting great deals on things like flights and hotels, and one of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by traveling during the “off” season. The off season is generally usually the month or season when a particular location welcomes the fewest tourists, which means hotels usually drop their rates to encourage visitors, and airlines reduce their fares to lure new bookings.

For some locations, you’ll barely see any difference between the off season and the busy season. During the off-season, you might encounter lines that take you 10 minutes to enter a popular tourist destination rather than the normal 20 minutes you’d experience during the busy season. In other cases, you might notice large swathes of the city or town you’re visiting are completely empty rather than overloaded with travelers like in busier months.

When it comes to Puerto Vallarta, the busiest or most popular times to travel are generally when the weather is less humid and there’s a lower chance of daily rains and storms. As far as temperatures go, October is one of the best months to visit because the temperatures tend to hover between the 70s and 80s (that’s Fahrenheit for all you cultured Celsius folk).

However, if you back it up by just a few months and visit in August, you’ll find yourself dripping wet with insane humidy, and you’ll also likely experience temperatures that never sink below 90 degrees during the day and barely sink below 85 degrees at night. You’ll also (probably) get daily rainstorms, making the coastline awash in lightning and thunderous clouds.

Is it worth visiting Puerto Vallarta when you may experience such inclement weather, high humidity, and significant temperatures? Well, let me share my experience from my mid-August visit in 2024.

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If You’re From a Dry Place, The Humidity Will Wreck You

How do you deal with the humidity if you’re not acclimatized to it?

As an American who’s lived in the Deep South with high humidity and temperatures in the stratosphere (thank you Gulf Coast Texas), I’m fully aware of how high humidity and heat work together. If you’re from a place that’s normally dry, or you’re not used to humid temperatures, Puerto Vallarta will absolutely wreck you. I say this as someone who hates humidity.

However, you can make things marginally easier to bear by selecting a hotel in Puerto Vallarta that has great air conditioning. The beautiful hotel we stayed at during our vacation had a gorgeous view and loads of TV channels for chillaxing after dark after our busy days, and the AC was truly amazing. It allowed us to get an amazing night of sleep every night of our stay.

If you have any qualms about sleeping in a hot room, but you’re trying to save money on your vacation: sacrificing air conditioning for a room that’s $20 or $30 cheaper per night is NOT worth it. Good sleep is one of the most important parts of a healthy vacation, especially if you’re visiting a place like Puerto Vallarta where you might be taking part in tiring activities every day like jet skiing, swimming, or walking around sightseeing.

Obviously, dressing appropriately for the trip will help greatly in your ability to deal with the humidity, but bear in mind that the heat and humidity will remain even after dark, so that means AC is a must for sleeping if you’re normally acclimatized to a drier climate. I live in Los Angeles, so I’m used to 100+ temps during the summer, but even I’m a bit melted by the humidity when it gets that thick.

Meteorologically speaking, the driest months in Puerto Vallarta are January and February, and the coastline gets the lowest amount of rain in April and May. Those are the months when you’ll see higher tourist activity, which means scoring cheaper stays and tickets will usually occur outside of those months.

Post-Pandemic Flights Aren’t As Cheap As They Once Were

Are the days of cheap flights to Mexico totally gone?

One thing I’ve noticed about traveling in the “off season” and especially to places like Puerto Vallarta where there was once a very well-defined off-season is that plane tickets have started to look the same at every time of the year. At this point, it’s literally finding a random flight that’s been discounted for no obvious reason as far as getting a truly cheap flight goes.

At one time, it was pretty easy to get a sub-$100 flight to Puerto Vallarta, but those days are long gone. Even scoring sub-$200 flights has become nearly impossible. If you keep your eyes peeled, you should be able to get a flight below $300 for most flights between the Southwestern United States and Puerto Vallarta, and every once in a while you might get a sub $200 flight.

If you’re traveling from further away and will need to make a few stops before you reach Mexico, one of the less expensive options will be to take one flight to the closest city that has a direct flight to Puerto Vallarta and then book a totally separate flight to get into Mexico. So, say you’re flying from Europe and want to get to Puerto Vallarta.

If you can make it cheaply to Manchester, UK or Helsinki, Finland, you can get on a direct flight to Puerto Vallarta from those cities. Unfortunately (as of this writing anyway), those are the only cities on the whole continent where you can get to Puerto Vallarta directly. Part of the reason for this is because a lot of flights will stop on the Yucatan Peninsula area of Mexico, which is on the east before hopping over to Puerto Vallarta in the west.

My only advice when booking multiple tickets to get to Puerto Vallarta – or anywhere else for that matter – is to make sure you have a healthy layover between the flights. Don’t book a flight that lands in Los Angeles at 5:00 PM and expect to board a direct flight to Puerto Vallarta at 6:00 PM. Remember that you’ll probably need to get your baggage from one flight to another because you’re taking two separate flights, and that takes time.

Is Puerto Vallarta Busy During the Off Season?

A lot of Americans and Mexicans visit Puerto Vallarta when it’s hot.

Americans love visiting Mexico, and we’ll often travel there in any season, even if the weather is “terrible” or the season isn’t exactly perfect for traveling. As a consequence, the “off” season in Mexico is sort of a misnomer, especially in the laidback town of Puerto Vallarta, which is really geared toward tourism and beachy things.

When I last visited in August, the weather was really hot, really humid, and we had a few thunderstorms roll through during our stay. However, there were still a lot of tourists visiting the town, mostly from Mexico, some Central American countries, and the United States. The number of tourists wasn’t crazy though. It’s not like a high season visit to Disneyland where you can barely squeeze around all the people.

As far as getting a spot to relax on the beach, booking a few activities, and getting a table at various restaurants, we never encountered any huge lines, big waits, or sold-out events. But part of that stems from the fact that Puerto Vallarta isn’t as easily reached by travelers from other continents without a stop somewhere along the way – or even two stops in many cases.

If you want to visit from Europe, you might need to make a stop in the United States first on a layover, or in Mexico City or South America. Puerto Vallarta is pretty small, so getting there direct isn’t as easy as it is with bigger cities throughout Mexico. However, if you are from Europe, Asia, or a place where you need a layover to get to Puerto Vallarta, you should still consider visiting, even if the weather might be incredibly different than what you’re used to.

Puerto Vallarta is a welcoming and fun place to visit in any season. Mexicans are incredibly friendly, and it goes without saying that they have some of the best food on the planet. If you’re searching for a fun little escape to a beach town that offers just enough nightlife and excitement, Puerto Vallarta is the perfect place to visit. I had a wonderful time despite my aversion to humidity, and I’d visit again in a flash.

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