We're from here

Our story

Martinez East End Tours is run by three siblings. We were born and raised on this island.

I'm Jafeth. I moved to the United States to study and to play basketball, and I'm working on a business degree. This company is the thing I've been wanting to build the whole time I've been away from home.

We are not a company that came to Roatán to sell tours. Our family is from here. Oscar and Mireska live and work on the island. I'm the one who left, and I'm the one who wants you to see this place the way we grew up seeing it.

Our family is Garífuna, and we have been on this island for 229 years. Our people were exiled from St. Vincent and landed here in 1797, in dugout canoes, on the east end of Roatán.

Punta Gorda — the village we take guests to — is where our family is from. It is not a stop on an itinerary for us. My mother runs a restaurant there called Yurumei. That is a family business too, and this one is built the same way.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people step off a ship at Mahogany Bay or Coxen Hole, spend six hours here, and sail away having seen one beach. That's the tourist side of Roatán. It's beautiful, but it isn't the island.

The island is the mangrove tunnels you reach by panga boat. It's Punta Gorda, the oldest Garífuna settlement in Honduras, founded in 1797, where the drums are still played and the food is still cooked the old way. It's the reef — the second largest on the planet — close enough to swim to from the beach. It's Pigeon Cay, a patch of white sand out past the East End that most visitors never hear about. These are the places you only find if someone who lives here takes you to them.

The other reason we built this is simple: booking a tour in a country you've never been to should not feel like a risk. So there's no payment up front, no deposit, and no call center. My brother Oscar, my sister Mireska and I have our real names and our real phone numbers on this website, and we answer our own messages. If you book with us, you know exactly who is meeting you and where.

Oscar and Mireska run the tours on the ground here. I built this website from the States. It's a family business, and Roatán is home.

What we care about

• Getting you back to your ship. Every itinerary reserves a full hour of buffer before your all-aboard time.
• Showing you the real island. The reef and the beaches, but also the mangroves, the Garífuna east end, and the places that never make the excursion list.
• Booking that feels safe. No deposit, no payment until the day, and real people with real names answering your messages.
• Keeping groups small. Most tours cap at ten to fourteen people so you're not queueing behind a bus.
• The reef. We brief every guest on reef-safe sunscreen and no-touch snorkeling. The reef is our livelihood.

Where we operate

We cover the whole island — from West Bay and West End in the west, through Sandy Bay, Coxen Hole and French Harbour, out to Punta Gorda and Camp Bay in the east. We pick up at both cruise terminals, at hotels across the island, and at Roatán Airport.