Barcelo Karmina: Nice Resort

This was a beautiful resort, nice grounds, the pools were very nice and well kept. The beach isn't very big and swimming at low tide is difficult to do especially without water shoes on because of the rocks. The hotel room we had (2011) had a little bit of what looked like black mold near the A/C vent and the couches were in very rough shape. Other than that, our room was nice and a very big. It had two TV's! lol The service at the restaurants was sometimes slow but not too bad. The food was goo [... read more]d and there was always a large variety and usually someone cooking fresh food on the grill. The drinks at the bars could have been better, we found them to be way too sweet and the pop/soda was always flat when we ordered Cuba Librés. The excursion guy (Miguel) was outstanding at his job and very knowledgeable. He was always around during the day if you had any questions. Overall, this was a good resort and we would consider going back someday.

Sunscape Puerto Plata: Wonderful - IF you stay on the resort

Barcelo Puerto Plata was a beautifully clean, well managed resort. The rooms were clean and large. Mini bar really means pop and water, but if you wanted alcohol it was never very far away. Live entertainment every night was fun and entertaining. The 2 pools closed at 6:00 pm would have been nice to go for a evening dip but we understood about the safety factor. Truly the only thing and probably the biggest thing that will make me NEVER want to go back was the overly zealous in your face, don't  [... read more]take no for an answer people TRYING to sell you things on the beach. We were Never informed that the Barceló was on a "Public Beach" and the hotel security had no jurisdiction to chase them away. I suffered overwhelming panic attacks after the first 2 days of even venturing onto the beach in fear of being bombarded with requests to buy things. To please help them to feed their families. I would recommend the hotel to a friend but only after I warned them about the beach and the people there waiting for them.

Barcelo Maya Colonial: Wonderful Resort!

This was our second time here and we really enjoyed our stay! There were many activities for my 15 year old and new things such as a bowling alley, paddle tennis courts, Pirate's Island, and a mall. The staff were always smiling and helpful. We would definitely return to this resort.

Barcelo Bavaro Beach: Great Resort - we would go back

Hotel is close to the airport. Very friendly and helpful staff, clean rooms, well groomed grounds. Service at the bars/restaurants was quick, food was great with lots of variety at the buffet, as well as plenty of restaurants to choose from. Make your dinner reservations for the week as soon as you get in to get better choice of seating time. Evening shows at either resort were very entertaining. We stayed at the adults only resort, but both pools were extremely busy so we were on the beach ever [... read more]yday - plenty of lounge chairs available on the beach and the beach itself was kept clean of seaweed every morning.

Sunscape Dominican Beach: Not bad, but would not go back

We stayed at this hotel from Feb 17- 24, it was not a terrible place, however I will not be back at this resort. When we originally booked it was a 4 star hotel and before we arrived it had changed to a 3 star. The Beach was amazing, lots of chairs at the beach and the pool. Food - was pretty average at the A la Carte and the buffets Bars- Every time you ordered a drink you were not sure what you would be getting, I ordered the drink special of the day and pointed to the picture and they still c [... read more]ouldn't get it right. However if you go to the Casino Bar Calvin was a very good bartender, made excellent drinks and his service was fantastic! Cleanliness - Cock Roaches in rooms, and they fumigated and said it wasn't harmful and we could stay in our rooms. When we got our room cleaned it would always be around dinner time, and we would never get enough towels. However the house keeping staff were very nice but spoke barely any English. The Resort Grounds - Were well kept and they were always fixing something. We were not bugged to much on the beach for locals selling stuff. Pools - were not the cleanest Not that you go down south to play on the internet however the WIFI you pay for barely worked while you were in the lobby.

Occidental Caribe: Had a Great Time!!!

Resort is good and I would recommend/return. Service in restaurants, bars and around pool was excellent. Food was good; had an omelette everyday, custom pasta bar was great, a la cartes also nice. Only downside; not enough lounge chairs around pools or on beach. This lead to people stealing chairs; witnessed several altercations and had my chair stolen once. Definitely affects the "holiday feel" of your trip having to battle for chairs and always having to leave someone from your group with yo [... read more]ur chairs.

Sunscape Puerto Plata: Great getaway

My wife and I just returned from the Barcelo Puerto Plata resort. Buildings and grounds were kept up well. Plenty of restaurants and nice buffet. Didn't care too much for the Japanese restaurant but probably went expecting what we get in Toronto, which it wasn't. We upgraded to a Club Premium suite in building 16 which "made" the trip. Highly recommend the upgrade although probably wouldn't book the suite next time, just a Club Premium room -didn't use the extra rooms much. This resort is just t [... read more]he right size for us, not massive and not too small. Most staff were friendly.

Sunscape Puerto Plata: beautiful resort

The place is beautiful,rooms are specious,furniture and bathroom are very old,need renovating . Small things were frustrating,like TV remote control and clock not working. Everywhere was very clean. Service in the restaurant was not very good. Sometimes you have to wait more than 15 min for coffee,or for the table to be set,despite of many weitres moving around. All in all it was OK for the price we paid.

Sunscape Dominican Beach: Barcelo Dominican Beach February 2015

Beautiful beach however when we stayed at the hotel they were at 106 capacity and over booked. This meant having to line up for the buffet, lines for bathrooms, not enough seats on the beach, by the pool and in the lobby in the evening. Our room had a leaky ceiling in the bathroom. Management said that they fixed the problem however the whole duration of our stay there daily was a puddle of water left from the dripping ceiling. Additionally our room had cockroaches. I would not return to this ho [... read more]tel. Few of the staff provided excellent service. The quality of the drinks being served was poor. The hotel is run down. There is no free wifi. We were provided with a hospitality room before leaving to the airport which had not been cleaned and was full of wet towels from previous guests. I will not return to Barcelo Dominican Beach.

Barcelo Maya Palace: Above Average Resort for All Tastes

What strikes one immediately when approaching the lobby of the Barcelo Palace is the sense of space and elegance. The vast lobby and grounds make it possible not to feel crowded even in the high season when we arrived to escape wintry Toronto like many other Canadians. The pools are enormous, clean and inviting and I especially like substantial but different pool areas exclusively for adults as well as for children. Although the rooms are quite a walking distance to the restaurants and the beach [... read more], the corridors and the gardens are very nicely kept and decorated with sculptures and fountains that they made the walks like a pleasant daily exercise before indulging yourselves in the restaurants. The a la carte restaurants are one of the best I have visited in all inclusive resorts. The Seafood and the French restaurants are really first class and their service equally so. The lobsters are so fresh and deliciously cooked. The disappointment both in service and quality of food is the Argentinian beef Restaurant Rodizio. Suddenly you are back down to earth in an slightly below average experience with rather negligent waiters and ordinary steaks in an uninteresting ambience. The buffet restaurants are very good in its varieties and freshness of food and all the restaurant and cafe staff maintained a high level of manners and friendliness even at the peak breakfast times. Now the down side : the customers' service and the internet. All the lobby front desk staff and customers' service are very hard pushed to serve all the visitors. There's just too few of them and they seem to be trying very hard but not given enough correct information by the management. The fact that there is no dedicated cashier desk make the queues and line ups long and laborious even when you only intended to ask the simplest of questions. One feels that the hotel and their staff do not have or want a lot to do with the staff from the Holiday firms. Hence, when I asked for help on arrival regarding my lost luggage by AirTransat and who to get in touch with, the hotel lobby staff could offer no help except a rueful smile of sympathy. The internet was bad. Bought a $45 wifi service that's supposed to work in your room and the central lobby area and it did not work at all in my room when I was really relying on it to get help to locate my lost luggage. (Remember it is a good 10 minutes walk to the lobby) . Subsequently, it is still very erratic service in the room. The bedroom themselves were very good and outside the quiet balcony we had, we could even spot a deer at night together with other some small interesting animals. All the chamber staff were excellent and friendly and the facilities clean and excellently kept. The beach is vast and gorgeous and never short of a chair to lie on. Soft sand and plenty of shallow water where you can see fishes and some even saw turtles. Also the location made it possible to have a big variety of local excursions for Mayan temples as well as cenotes and other sporty ventures. All in all , I thoroughly enjoyed my stay there and I am not easy to please !

Sunscape Puerto Plata: Just Ok

The hotel itself is nice enough, check in took close to an hour and a half. The pool has a gross thick feeling and has these weird floating things in it. The food was decent but as I type Im here sick. The highlight of my trip was the 12 waterfalls and Big Lees Beach Bar.

Barcelo Maya Colonial: Lots of activities

The resort is spotless. Staff are everywhere cleaning, serving and attending to guest needs. Lots of activities for all ages. We enjoyed the outdoor paddleball racket courts. great fun. Our favourite restaurants were the Mexican and Japanese. The Italian restaurant was disappointing at the fish main courses were previously frozen and tasted like cardboard. We travelled with our 20 something year old kids. they enjoyed the resort more than we did. they enjoyed the disco until the wee hours.

Barcelo Maya Colonial: Wonderful Vacation

Hotel was beautiful situated on lovely grounds. Beach and pool good. Staff very friendly and service good. Buffet and restaurants very good. Had a wonderful time and would return. Would recommend to friends.

Barcelo Ixtapa: Good value and pleasant

Grounds, pools, etc. were fine. Dining areas clean, tidy and well managed. Food occasionally disappointing. Great staff - very pleasant and helpful. Room quite good, showing age a bit, especially in bathroom; could have been a bit cleaner.

Barcelo Ixtapa: Outdated resort in an amazing town

We had a wonderful time at the Barcelo Ixtapa! The resort was outdated and the buffets were definitely lacking. The bars were virtually non existent. But the service was amazing, the views were gorgeous, and the area was spectacular!

Occidental Caribe: Barcelo is not what it used to be!!!!

Food was great both buffet and restaurants, service was also really good. Our room and resort was very tired looking. Our air conditioner and shower did not work, and the plaster from the ceiling was falling down onto bed when sleeping...

Occidental Caribe: Good time had by all

We stayed at the Barceló Punta Cana from Feb 6 – 13. We were a group of 13 and we all overall enjoyed our stay. It was a nice convenient 25 min ride from the airport. First of all, I’m pretty basic when it comes to vacations and don’t normally stay at high end places so if you're use to 5 star luxury resorts you may want to reconsider. The resort is older, but they manage to keep it very clean and I would always see workers cleaning/updating things daily. I only had a few minor complaint [... read more]s over the week we stayed, most of them being around customer service from the front desk. We arrived late to the resort, around 12am, so we were all tired after a long day of travelling. Check in took over 45 minutes and they would allow other guests to butt the line of people waiting to check in. I had e-mailed the resort ahead of time requesting our group be placed together and to be in building three – I kept e-mailing them until I finally got a response confirming they received my e-mail. After waiting a long time to check in, we did manage to get rooms in building three. For the most part our rooms were fairly close together. ROOMS I stayed in room 3221. It was clean and had a very nice view. We always had hot water (sometimes a little bit too much hot water). The door of the room over looked the buffet so sometimes it would get quite noisy and hot from the heat of the buffet. A few of the nights they would be doing repairs during the middle of the night with power tools etc . I thought it was strange but I was still able to sleep and didn’t care too much. Majority of the nights after 10-11 p.m. our toilet would not flush. The other five rooms of our group had the same issue. Our Air Transat rep told us it was due to some water issues they were having and it was only going to be 1 or 2 nights, but it ended up being the whole week. Everyone’s A/C worked good and the rooms have ceiling fans as well which I found helped a lot. Beds were quite comfy and the cleaning lady changed the bedding every day. We got fresh towels everyday and the mini fridge was stocked daily. We did leave small gifts and a small tip for the cleaning lady every day and she was always very happy and appreciative. We had a nice flat screen tv but found it to be quite blurry. I found majority of the channels were in Spanish but did manage to find a few decent stations. Never saw one bug or anything in our room. About half way through the week we did receive a call from the front desk or something asking if we were happy with our room…so I did appreciate the follow up, but overall I was quite happy with our room, especially since it was so close to everything. Elevators were quick and worked every single day except the last day we were there because it was raining and somehow flooded them. POOLS I found both pools to be gorgeous. Service at the time up bar was pretty good – didn’t have to wait long to get drinks. The only complaint I have about the pools is the lack of lounge chairs. People would constantly throw their towels over lounge chairs to “claim” them…at times I would never even see people that entire day come back to their chair. I just felt like we wasted so much time trying to find somewhere to lounge. Aside from that, the pools were kept very clean and maintained nicely. BEACH The beach was beautiful. They would clean the seaweed away every morning. The waves were quite intense and usually had a yellow or red flag out, so you couldn’t expect to really go swimming without being slapped by waves. FOOD I found the food to be quite good at the buffet. They would change it up every night so it wasn’t too repetitive. Breakfast was pretty much the same everyday but quite tasty. I give kudos to the guy making the omelets – from the beginning of his shift to the end he was always smiling. We did four a la cartes – the Dominican, Japenese, Italian and French. The Japanese was by far the best one we had. Food was made fresh in front of us and was an awesome show. The other a la cartes were just mediocre and the service was quite slow. Some of us would get upset stomachs afterwards. We never had any problems booking the a la cartes. The hotel actually prebooked our reservations, but we had to get them all changed and had no problem doing so. You were only allowed to book three in advance, but they would post availability daily and you could make additional reservations if you booked the day of. The pizzeria at the pool bar was good – but again service was slow. One day it took us over an hour to get our food. I do realize they were only limited to the one oven and the waiters would constantly keep bringing us drinks without even asking so it made the wait a little better. The pizzas and calzones were stone baked, fresh and delicious. At night the pool bar would serve food up until about 4-5 a.m. They had food such as hot dogs, quesadillas, chicken wings, French fries etc. NIGHT LIFE To be honest…I only made it out to one nightly show. It was one of those ones where they pick people from the audience. It was funny but felt really disorganized. Our a la carte dinners were usually late so by the time we were done dinner the entertainment would be over or else I would of checked out more shows. They would sometimes have live music playing in the lobby but that didn’t seem to go on late. The disco at night was open until 2am. It’s in the downstairs from the lobby and the sound seemed pretty well contained. I found some nights at the disco better then others…they would tend to play a lot of latin salsa type music…which fine for a few songs but they didn’t seem to mix it up very well. We would request songs and then would have to wait half an hour to hear them even if there was hardly anyone else there. It was nothing special but at least something to do at night. CHECK OUT Unfortunately we had a 10:30 p.m. flight and the bus to the airport wasn’t coming to pick us up until 7:30 p.m. Check out is at noon and they leave a note under your door the night before explaining you can request late check out for $10 an hour. We figured we would try and keep one or two rooms to shower and keep our luggage. I inquired about this service the day before we were to check out. I was told to come back the next day and they would be able to help me. About 2 hours before check out I requested the late check out and told I wasn’t able to do late check out because it was “too busy”. The maximum they could provide was until 2:00 p.m. I was however informed that they have “courtesy” rooms so people can shower etc. We decided to go this route as we wanted to enjoy the full day by the pool. Unfortunately after checking out it decided to pour rain all day long. It was just unfortunate to not have a room or have anywhere to go for an entire day due to the rain. I did decide to use the courtesy room to shower and was told we could have half an hour each. After waiting 45 minutes we had our turn and not even being in the room for 10 minutes front desk was already calling asking when we would be done. There was a pretty big line up to use it, so I recommend if you have a later flight to really push for the late check out and keep your room. The courtesy room we used was in building 5 on the bottom level…I would definitely have to say our room in building 3 was A LOT better and made me appreciate it even more. I should note that check out was really fast and easy. I hope in the future they develop a better system for check in as it was ridiculously long and disorganized. OVERALL Overall I really did have a good time. I believe most of this was due to travelling in a large group, because it’s really impossible to not have a good time. There were some minor stomach issues here and there with everyone in group due to the food…but it was nothing really consistent. I believe we all had the same opinions about the resort as we all had a good time. I can’t complain about the room we received at all. We had a birthday in the group mid-week and they put a banner on her door and had a fruit basket and bottle of champagne delivered which I thought was really nice. I also asked if they could do a cake for her birthday which they did for us at the Italian a la carte at no extra charge. We got this resort at a fairly reasonable price so overall I am happy with my choice. Wifi is available but is at an extra charge. Some people were able to get a connection in their room but I found you had to walk around to get connection. The wifi is kind of overpriced in my opinion ... $12 for 24 hours or $50 for a week. That gets you one code so you can't use it on multiple devices at one time. Not sure if I would return to this resort as I like to try new places, but I would recommend this resort if you got it for a good price. If they could work out the consistency of service between staff then this place would be awesome. For the most part I found you didn't need to tip a lot to get good service.

Barcelo Maya Palace: Excellent stay

We stayed at the Palace Deluxe and it seemed to be superior to the other 4 hotels in the complex. Of course it was the most expensiveness well. The grounds appeared more spacious and more grand.The a la carte restaurants were excellent. We did not try the restaurants in the other hotels and so I cannot say that they were definitely better. All the service staff were very friendly and attentive. My only complaint was that the front desk staff did not seem as well trained as the service staff. On  [... read more]more than one occasion I received conflicting replies to my enquiries. When I enquired about booking for the future one staff told me that the room will cost a certain amount per day, regardless of the number of people, which was of course not true. All in all we enjoyed our stay and would not hesitate to recommend it to our friends.

Barcelo Solymar: Very nice location and a very nice beach!!

One delihtful thing!! One morning a Colobri came flying to me on the 4th floor. The gardner who was watering the Plant Wall showed us the bird's nest. Every morning we had a pleasure of to find out if she was in or out!!! The best feature of this hotel is the food. so many variety and abundance. Nightly shows were very well done. It was good that we can use next door Arenas Blancas. I think that the maintenance of the building was rather poor . For example, the public toilet needed painting  [... read more]and door locks should be fixed.

Barcelo Maya Beach Resort: Barcelo Maya Beach - Overall Good Hotel!

Overall the hotel was beautiful. An older hotel that seems to be doing their best to upgrade and keep up with the times. Always well kept grounds, very clean and generally appealing. Lots for everyone to do. We had an 11 year old that enjoyed finding seashells on the beach, splashing in the big pool, playing chess, basketball, paddle tennis, bowling and billiards and watching the dolphins. The water park and wave rider were also lots of fun for him. The water park was an additional cost, but we [... read more] found it reasonable. We didn't find the bowling or arcade as reasonable. $12 US per person to bowl one game seemed expensive to us. But we still had lots of fun doing it. Rooms were clean, well stocked and comfortable. However the bathrooms don't seem to have fans which can make for a very humid room after 2 or 3 showers! Pools are huge and clean. Lots of chairs for everyone. Beach was amazing! Clean, spacious, long for walking on and full of things to see. Our only real disappointment was the food. This is our 5th time to Mexico and we usually always enjoy the food. However this resort seems to do the same foods over and over again, not really changing anything up. Need a bit more variety. Lots of walking as it is a big complex but always good after all the food or drink you consume in a day (even if its not the best!) ;) Overall we had a wonderful stay!