I’ve thought long and hard about whether maybe I’m just too hard of a critic and too demanding for my own good. But at the end of the day, you can’t fool yourself into believing something is better than it is. I don’t drink now obviously but even on my previous vacations, I haven’t gotten into the habit of having drinks with my meals, so it’s really hard to compromise on the quality of food for me when other people are getting loaded to the point of not caring whether their food is any good. But you see, when the resort comes so highly rated as this one appears to be and you pay twice the amount of what you would usually spend per person on a typical Mexican vacation, you start forming expectations. And those expectations were very much shattered. Imagine how disappointing it felt that the coffee served in restaurants is 10 x worse than what the little coffee machine in your room creates with some coffee-mate added!
Pros:
- Jacuzzi before bedtime in the moonlight is truly something
- Room service is included so you don’t need to leave your suite if you don’t feel like it or got *better* things to do!
- Main pool is the cleanest pool I’ve ever seen – you don’t miss the ocean when big waves are striking the shore
- “a la carte” restaurants are on a ‘first come, first served’ basis – no reservations needed and you may go as often as you like
- Biosilk cosmetics line: shampoo, conditioner, bubble bath, and lotion – all available for your personal use in your suite.
- Palace dollars / credits / points: you may use your $1500 credit (available if you book 7 nights) towards things like room upgrades, trips and tours, wine upgrades in restaurants, spa treatments, photo sessions, and even some jewelry (with lots of exceptions, limitations, and being responsible for taxes on the last two listed). You can use these at any of the other palaces if you get to visit them as well.
- Room is serviced three times during the day (twice for cleaning and once for restocking)
- Oriental Restaurant was the most decent one out of all (probably because they get to work with different ingredients there) and you can even take take-out to your room. My favorites there were their desserts, especially the deep-fried ice cream and the tempura banana dessert.
Cons:
- ”a la carte” is not really what you get in other resorts: same buffet food that gets served to you by waiters now instead of you getting it yourself
- Room service food is a long shot from what our western hotels would call to be room service (again – buffet food only wrapped in plastic wrap)
- LoBster dinner is abysmal – They definitely cook up one old ass lobster for you and oversalt it to a point of no return. And for $350 per couple – are you SERIOUS? I literally had to spit out the lobster due to the awful awful taste it had. And I’m definitely a lobster person, so for me to spit out lobster is just horror!
- Jungle tour, something people rave about in reviews, is no longer covered by palace dollars so you’ll have to settle for something that’s overbooked and less exciting than power boats and snorkeling
- If they include champagne for you, it’s the most bitter kind you’ll taste for free.
- Spa treatments: highly overpriced and delivered by highly underqualified personnel. Waxing: the wax resembled something like an actual glue you might find at a home hardware store at home and it sticks on your skin for days afterwards; the strips would constantly tear up in her hands so at times she would “paint” a new strip on top of the old one to tear it off if she couldn’t get it off herself after 5-6 tries. No joke. Massages ($139 for 50 minutes which was really like 40 minutes given all the time you had to wait for them to set up) are more like being “soaked and stroked” in oil. No real technique, no effort to get the knots out, no knowledge of the body anatomy. And what I hated most about it is that she actually got lots of that oil into my hair by going directly from my shoulders onto my scalp and doing so several times over and over. Truly gross. The pedicure was the only thing that I’d say was decent but at $70 a pop, maybe paint your own toes at home? There’s also a $300 credit limit on spa treatments.
- Just because they say you can spend your credits on jewelry or sunglasses doesn’t mean you get anything for free! If you look really really hard through their little silver store at the hotel (called Fini), you might find a pair of so-so earrings for $125. You can only put $100 of your credits towards earrings or sunglasses and you ‘re responsible for the taxes on those items as well so that’s an additional 11%. Most decent items cost $300 and above. Sunglasses (of a brand I’ve never even heard of before) are something like $500 and $600. You begin to appreciate why that store is empty most of the time now.
- Rooms: we probably got one of the least popular rooms in the whole hotel. We couldn’t upgrade to the concierge level room like we were going to initially because they were at 95% capacity when we checked in. They said we would have a jacuzzi in our room but it ended up being on the balcony because the room was so tiny on its own. It was also located at the end of the hallway, so we had to share our own little “lobby area” with a bigger suite. There was no real space for us to sit and eat inside the room (other than the balcony, on the dusty patio chairs) so occasionally we’d drag the chairs and the coffee table from the common area into our own suite to actually eat the room service food / take out. What’s the point of getting room service if you are forced to eat at the bar or on your bed? And we could hear the conversations word by word from the suite next to us as well as their phone ringing. Thankfully they weren’t honeymooners.
- The service people visit your rom 3 times a day. That really cuts into your schedule. They would always come to restock the fridge in the afternoon when we would be trying to catch a nap while the sun is too hot outside. So if you miss the restocking guy, you have to call reception and list the items you want to be restocked and then wait for them by the door to bring it up for you which may be 20-30 minutes. And because we had two doors (one for the common area and one for our own suite), you couldn’t be on the patio in the hot tub while waiting because you wouldn’t hear the knock. It’s kind of a snowball effect at that point. And while it’s nice that they clean your room once in the morning and once before dinner (which they call “turning down your bed”), I still think it’s a little excessive but hey, maybe it’s just me.
- There are no real shows other than on Fridays right before people are leaving, that’s when you get to see the “fire show” which is nothing truly spectacular. I started yawning 5-10 minutes in and left early to go read in the suite. Other than that, you get an occasional karaoke night in the lounge on the first floor and a dance class at 7 somewhere.
- They only have a shuttle service to the Moon Palace and for any other palace, you need to take the bus (or the bus and a ferry like to the Cozumel Palace) which isn’t expensive but takes a loooooooong time. It took us over an hour to travel 20 km along the “hotel zone” strip to downtown Cancun (which is also nothing to be missed).
- Service: aside from disappointing spa experiences and slow-beyond-belief waitressing, I couldn’t lower my guard regarding cleanliness and hygiene. I’ve found hair in my food on more than one occasion and once I even found a spaghetti on my plate that was definitely not mine ))) I took a picture of it even.
I didn’t want to document the hair incidents however because they’ve done enough damage as it is by ruining my appetite. The plates were often dirty, smudged with many handprints all over them. Even our little chocolate dessert, delivered to our room with champagne, had a plate like that. Talk about killing the romance.
Here’re some handouts you are presented with at check-in:
Hopefully this helps some of you choose your vacation destination :)
