LOCATION
The complex is not too far from the Punta Cana Intl airport (PUJ), about a 20-25 min ride. It is also located at a nice section of the Bavaro beach with great fine sand and a wide enough beach that beach-walkers are not close to the chairs.
ATMOSPHERE
From the arrival, you can already feel the difference as you are greeted with cold towels to clean your hands and cool off from the heat.
The hotel is really for for couples and couples with children. Overall, it is a very “chill & relax” atmosphere throughout the resort, but you can find more specifically 3 themes;
1 - Relaxing around the lobby, its bar, its infinity pool along with the adjacent small kids pool and the “middle park section” (name I decided to give it) that is surrounded by another pool with hamacs over water and beds (covered and uncovered). There is also a spa which I have not personally tried but seemed very nice (walked by it). There is also the section of the beach that is part of the hotel with daily yoga sessions every morning. Also true, that from the beach, we could not hear the sound the sound from the pool closest to the beach.
2 - small party on the pool by the beach with the bar that plays party music most of the day and where you have fitness activities given by the entertainment team for people in the pool. I must say that when you are in that pool, you can hear the music that is loud enough but at the same time, which was great for people by the lobby, not loud enough for you to hear at all. Even in the middle park section, you can quickly lose the sound by the “pool party” which was great. The entertainment team tries really hard to change it up on a daily basis, as such, on the the Saturday we left (Jan 13th) they did a foam party on the beach.
3 - Water fun. There were too pools, one for children with slides and splashing water and another one for adults with big slides (kids taller than 130cm can also go into the adult slides). There is also obviously the beautiful public beach and seawater.
One funny thing that we noticed, the resort never really felt busy, because of the quantity and size of the pools for the size of the resort (only 373 rooms), we always felt it was half-full.
ROOMS
Rooms were spacious and cleaned, we had 2 young kids with us (5 and 3) and so we had asked for a two double beds. We had a balcony with a bath on it. The mini-fridge was filled daily If used. Only comment was the shower, it could have been a little bit cleaner to our liking (shower glass and a few missed spots (but we are also very freaky about it)
VALUE
The hotel is not the cheapest but for us, was well worth the additional money. We really enjoyed our stay, staff were very nice, helpful and flexible and the complex is beautiful, it is not too big but feels big because of the 3 well separated atmospheres. Yet
CLEANLINESS
The resort was really immaculate and maintained on a daily basis. Pool was cleaned every 2 days from what we personally saw. Palm trees and grass were maintained daily and the walk ways and lobby were cleaned continuously.
NOISE LEVEL
Surprisingly quiet. There is really places where it can get noisy, the party pool a bit because of the music, and in the lobby between 8 and 11pm for the daily entertainment. If you stay in the the complex facing the speakers, the sound resonates through the corridor at night (we had to use white noise sounds from our phone to suppress some sound to help the children fall asleep at night (If you stay on the other complex (the other side), it does not have that problem we heard from friends happening to stay there)
SERVICE
Service from the staff was perfect whether it was from the barmen/women to entertainment teams to the waiters in the restaurants or room service. They were friendly efficient and were very flexible in adapting to one’s needs. Talking about room service, it is done daily, so if you leave your do not disturb in the morning by accident, by the time you come back from dinner, they will have passed. I even heard and experienced room service at 9pm.
Service at the buffet was very efficient, if you were getting up for second round, by the time, you are back, your “dirty” plate is gone.
A small feedback for the hotel —> it would be a nice touch to notify new guests of the additional round of room service since we don’t expect hotels to do room service so often.
A big thank you to our room service lady (room 5331, I am so sorry for forgetting your name), Esmeralda Amada, Jose C, Gherson, Yudetel Dolores and Euclides at the lobby bar for the amazing drinks (Andres Special, Piña Colada, Mojito, Passion fruit premium, and I forget some) services and pleasant small talks, you made our trip really memorable and unforgettable and we really hope to see you back on our next one!! There is also the entertainment teams that were doing a great job and the Kids Adventures ladies that were doing an amazing job with the kids from morning to late at night.
I also heard from friends that were preferred club members that the service of their butlers was simply amazing and from their words “felt that they were being treated as if they were family members”.
Finally, a small detail but which left us impressed from the gardeners, they were always carefully when maintaining the palm trees and the grass by waiting for people to pass by and be far enough to cut the leaves/grass. They would literally stop their work to let you pass so that we wouldn’t get freshly cut grass on us from the weed eater.
FOOD
Food was good. I would say the the first two days, we found it ok, but the quality of the food at the World Caffè (buffet) specifically seemed to improve every day that we were there. The dinner on the beach (they closed-off the buffet and moved it to the beach literally) was out of this world with fresh bbq cooking. The difficulty with the buffet was sometimes, you would get over-cooked meat/seafood as expected since some of it might stay longer in the pan and cook a bit more. Of the 4 other restaurants (Oceana, SeaSide Grill, Fusion (Japanese) and Portofino (Italian)), it was really, the Oceana, for us was the one we were less impressed.
Allergens were mostly very clearly marked on the menu which is nice any person that has allergies or parents of kids that have (Only exception was Fusion surprisingly)
Feedbacks for the hotel
- update the allergens for the menu of Fusion (my daughter is allergic to eggs and most of the menu does not specify any allergens besides seafood mostly and I was quite surprised to find eggs in my Seafood rice)
- Possibly a similar to first point above for the calamari appetizer at Portofino, depending on the mayonnaise you use (I suspect you use regular mayo), the calamari comes with mayo on the plate but it is not specified that it contains eggs
- Menu for kids —> we understand that kids can vary from 2 years old to 17 but I would add a portion sizes for kids say “Smaller portion” and “Regular portion” as in our case, our kids had more pasta / chicken fingers in their plates that we had raviolis in the regular menu for adults (we had maybe 7 or 8 raviolis in the plate)
AMENITIES
Overall this is a beautiful and very well-maintained resort. You have plenty of pools, activities for kids and adults, We didn’t even feel like doing activities outside the resorts since they had so much already. The resort is well designed, spacious (private beach section too), clean with amazing staff as you would expect from a high-end resort.
You can find anything
- kids adventures
- a small shop for snacks or popular items you people forget to bring or run out of
- Fooseball tables and pingpong
- Gym and spa
- 2 in-pool bars + 1 in lobby + 1 by the beach + 1 on the beach
- A giant chess game that is surprisingly busy
- Volleyball court on the beach
- A video game room although it was empty or any players and with reasons since there is so much else to do
We will be definitely be coming back but this time we will book a room with access to the pool.
This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews.
This response is the subjective opinion of the management representative and not of Tripadvisor LLC.