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Puerto Vallarta’s gay hospitality scene rarely collides with prime-time reality television. That’s about to change. Tristan Schukraft, the founder and brains behind The Tryst Puerto Vallarta, is making his reality TV debut on Bravo’s “Below Deck” franchise — and he’s bringing his fiancé and five boyfriends along for the ride.
Schukraft has been coming to Puerto Vallarta for more than 15 years and now splits his time between the city and the United States. Here, he’s best known in Puerto Vallarta as the owner of The Tryst Puerto Vallarta, the 53-room boutique hotel on Púlpito Street that he purchased and reimagined as part of his Tryst Hospitality brand. The hotel began welcoming guests in the fall of 2024, then threw a celebrity-studded grand-opening weekend the following April that drew more than 200 guests, including surprise appearances by Jennifer Coolidge and Demi Lovato, along with Antoni Porowski, Laverne Cox and Shea Couleé. Tryst Hospitality also runs a sister property in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with new locations planned for Fire Island, New York; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Wilton Manors, Florida; and Rio de Janeiro.
It hasn’t been confirmed which “Below Deck Mediterranean” installment or episode will feature him. The show airs on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo and episodes stream Tuesdays on Peacock. The episode featuring Schukraft is expected to air during season 11, in the fall of 2026.
What is confirmed is the cast Schukraft brings aboard: fiancé Melvin Alexander, his partner of seven years since a 2024 proposal, plus five additional boyfriends. Schukraft describes the arrangement as three separate throuples sharing one household rather than a single relationship.
“There’s a lot of love in our family,” he told WEHO Times. “I never really worry about what people think of me.”
Long before Bravo’s cameras showed up, Schukraft had already earned a reputation as the self-described “CEO of Everything Gay.” He built his first business at 21, selling Razor scooters out of a pickup truck. That hustle eventually became ID90 Travel, an airline e-ticketing platform, and then MISTR, a telehealth company offering free or low-cost PrEP and STI testing that now serves more than 700,000 patients, according to Uncloseted Media.
That same drive to protect queer spaces, more than to simply grow a portfolio, runs through his hospitality holdings. Schukraft owns The Abbey Food & Bar and The Chapel in West Hollywood, and in 2024 partnered with Green Qween to open the neighborhood’s first LGBTQ+-owned dispensary. He also owns Circo nightclub in Puerto Rico and D.S. Tequila in Chicago’s Northalsted neighborhood, and led a roughly $17 million purchase of a majority stake in Fire Island Pines’ historic commercial district, including the Pavilion nightclub, The Blue Whale and The Canteen.
“I’m motivated not so much about building businesses,” he told Out.com after landing on the magazine’s 2024 Out100 list in the Innovators category. “It’s about eliminating HIV, preserving the gay community” and working toward that every day.
For Puerto Vallarta, Schukraft’s Bravo debut means a local landmark is about to reach a national audience that has never heard of it. Wherever “Below Deck” catches up with him — the Mediterranean, the Caribbean or somewhere else entirely — the spotlight will follow him home, and Tryst’s corner of Puerto Vallarta’s gay hotel scene along with it.
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