Denver, Colorado
2017-09-03
Okay, not the best we'd visited
First, the good:- The food. Some of the best all-inclusive food we've ever had. We've been to a number of all-inclusive resorts, and Villa del Palmar had the best food of any of them.- Pool Service. Great folks bringing food, drinks, umbrellas, towels, pretty much anything we needed all the time. It was a real treat to just lounge by the pool all day, and have our every need met.- The rooms. Our rooms were very clean, the beds comfortable, and mostly well maintained.The bad:- The beach. The disclaimer here is that hurricane Franklin went by the second day we were there. So this probably stirred up the ocean, and made seaweed come in. However, even later in the week, when the hurricane was long gone, there were no fish to be seen while snorkeling in the beach off the resort. And, even though they cleaned up the seaweed daily, they piled it just next to the resort, and it stunk terribly. We ended up at the pool most days because the beach was so bad. And we usually far prefer the beach.- WiFi. This was one of our biggest beefs. The WiFi costs $10 per day per device. We've never been to a resort recently that didn't have free WiFi, so this was kind of surprising to us. And way overboard expensive.- Signing for meals. This was such a pain. Because there are options for all-inclusive and not, we had to sign for each meal. We've never been in a resort where we had to sign for the meal. If you're considering not going all-inclusive here, don't. The food is really expensive. I'm glad we did the all-inclusive option.- The staff's willingness to work with us. We requested one room with a king, and another room with two queens. Both rooms had a king, so our daughters had to sleep in one bed. We asked them to be moved, but the would have had to be in a separate building far from us. And the staff seemed to be reluctant to do this.- Membership sales. This gets so old. Every resort we go to any more it seems there is a big sales pitch for membership (not Time-Share, but sure looks like Time-Share!). We found them pushy even though we made it obvious that we didn't want to sit through the presentation.- NO nightlife! My wife and I really wanted something to do late at night, but the resort pretty much shuts down at 11. Granted it's a family resort, but it would be nice to have something to do.- Buffet closed three nights of the week. We were very surprised by this. The restaurants were open, but because the buffet was closed, the wait times were often 1/2 hour to 45 minutes.Overall, we did like the resort, it was clean, well cared for and most of the staff was very good, but we won't go back. There are a lot of other resorts we think are better and better value.
