Sorry for not posting yesterday, but I needed a full day to decompress from the trip home. It was more eventful than anticipated! I will do a separate post on our adventures in Punta Cana airport at a later date.
We have just spent a week at the Lopesan Costa Bavaro Resort, Spa and Casino in the Dominican Republic. As I said before we have never been to an all inclusive resort before; nor have we ever been to the Caribbean. So I am no expert but these are my opinions/observations. We went with our son, daughter-in-law and their two small boys ages, 7 and 4. We booked a king garden view room and were upgraded to a pool view room. Son and family were upgraded to an ocean view room, and their view was lovely.
This resort is around 30 minutes from the airport, however if you have a kamikaze driver it probably only takes 20 minutes......just saying 🤨
Here are some photos of the front of the resort and the lobby:
I put a link to the hotel in the second paragraph of this post, where you'll see more information about the resort. We booked through Expedia, no idea if we got a good deal or not?
Pros of this resort:
Reasonably compact, everything easy to walk too.
Pools were great. Multiple of them, you could be in the large pool with many people or go to one of the smaller lap pools. Plus there were two water parks. A smaller one for younger children and a larger one for all age groups.
Many restaurant options to choose from. Also numerous bar options to choose from.
Well maintained and very clean.
Staff very friendly and polite.
The buffet options were good, with something for everyone. Bottled water was served at every meal.
Plenty of bottled water supplied in the hotel rooms. You cannot, nor should you drink the tap water!!
Great coffee shop, went nearly everyday.
Cons of this resort:
None of the shows started until at least 10pm at night.
There was very little entertainment between 6pm and 10pm if you had children, just a guy playing the saxophone or another guy playing music.
The casino was very basic, only went the once.
We couldn't get reservations to any of the good restaurants for the first two days. When we did eat at the nicer restaurants, the presentation was spot on for the food, but the taste didn't match.
The beach wasn't that well taken care of, lots of seaweed, and not a lot of swimming in the ocean, as it was cordoned off with buoy's.
This was as much our fault, as it was theirs but the language barrier was frustrating at times. As I don't speak Spanish and some of the staff's English skills was lacking. We had a couple of issues with our room, and we ended up just giving up with it, as we were not getting anywhere........again as much our fault as theirs.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I loved the all inclusive idea, as I neither had to cook or clean for a week, my idea of a holiday. I managed to read 3 1/2 books (I was half way through one that I also took on vacation) while away, and could have done with taking another couple with me. Enjoyed having the family with us to show us the ropes, and enjoyed having extra time with the boys.
We spent very little all week, and what we did spend was mainly tipping the staff. Even then it was only a couple of dollars (American) here and there. We did give the lady who cleaned our room $20, as the poor woman spent all week trying to teach me Spanish!!! Hola!
The older of the two grandsons did come down food poisoning on the Monday night, which was unfortunate. So took him to the doctors and get some meds, as there was a doctor on site. He was well enough to travel on the Wednesday. I had an iffy tummy one day, but other than a bit of sunburn we all faired well during the trip.
So all in all a success with a lot of great memories made. I think we will be doing this sort of trip every year from now on. We were booked to go to Jamaica but due the the weather damage they had last year we had to cancel, so maybe Jamaica will be our next place to visit?
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