A Very Nice Place
Written: Jun 18 '05 (Updated Jul 29 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great personal service. Great spa and gym. Small intimate feel.
Cons: Charges, charges, charges.
The Bottom Line: I'd stay at this place again, particularly if it were somewhere else. Cancun, it's too packaged for us.
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| xraydude888's Full Review: Le Meridien Cancun |
Update: After writing this review, we looked and looked through all of our various bags and found out that after staying at this hotel, we are missing 1) a PDA (my wife's) 2) a new Brookstone travel alarm clock 3) My wife's cell phone which someone had made hundreds of dollars of calls.
My wife had carried these items in a backpack. She did not take that backpack to any of our excursions or about town. It was left in the hotel room. We were staying on a club level floor with an attendant watching the elevators most of the time. Most likely, it was a hotel employee who "liberated" these items. Although we still recommend the Le Meridien, this leaves a rather sour taste in our mouths. Arguments can be made that we shouldn't have brought these expensive items to Mexico or to a hotel. Yes, but that's blaming the victim. Theft is theft no matter where you are or how poor you are.
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My family and I had a pleasant and overall problem-free week at Le Meridien. Before our stay, I was concerned about the mixed reviews that have been posted on this site.
First of all, this is not a 5-star hotel for those that expect extreme pampering. The Ritz-Carlton two doors down is, but the Ritz is pretty stuffy and pricier. And Le Meridien is not one of those huge all-inclusive cruise-ship-like resorts that pepper the Cancun landscape. The hotel has an European air about it, sort of a hushed elegance and only about 200 rooms and suites. You definitely do not feel lost in the place. The staff (concierge, front desk, bellhops, club-level attendants) eventually knew us by name.
We purchased our rooms through Expedia, upgraded from regular rooms to club-level rooms (which I would recommend doing so). Doing so gives you a free continental breakfast and also access to the 5PM-7PM cocktail "hour". This saved us quite a bit of money as we occasionally ate enough hors d'ouevres and drank enough juices, soft-drinks, and alcoholic beverages to forgo an expensive dinner.
The rooms (the entire hotel pretty much) are marble-floored. A little noiser since there is no carpeting to dampen the hallway noises. The rooms are pretty large in size and have large bathrooms with separate tubs (that have showers) and a separate shower stall with a glass door. We had one room that had a balcony and another room that had a very large window. The weird thing about the hotel is that the main axis of the hotel is built perpendicular to the beach front. Meaning most rooms look sort of directly at the hotels next to Le Meridien and when you look left or right, you either see the ocean or the lagoon. Only the suites, which are at the end of the hallways have a direct view of the ocean or the lagoon. It seems that all rooms have in-room safes to keep valuables.
The property is right on the beach. The surf was pretty heavy while we were there (tropical storm Arlene was headed towards the Gulf Coast for a few days during our stay). But the water was this amazing brilliant turquoise blue. The swimming pool was nice. 3 pools. Bathtub-warm water. A small playground with a jungle gym for the little kiddies. The gym was very nice. The equipment was not the cutting-state-of-the art but modern enough to get a good workout. I think there were trainers on hand (there were these very chiseled, very tanned young men who seemed to be there all the time working with female guests). They have a great spa, which my wife used all the time and I used once. Inside the spa, there is a large ante-room with a fountain sprinkled with rose-petals. Comfy chairs were at the edge of this room in which you could drink all sorts of soothing or supposedly healthful drinks. I had a pretty good massage there.
The concierges were extremely helpful. We had made reservations at the Club Grille in the Ritz-Carlton for dinner. As we were walking out the hotel, the concierge ran out after us and told us that they had a dress code at the Ritz. No sneakers. Oops. I had forgot to bring a pair of dress shoes. I told the concierge that if they wouldn't let us in, we'd just go somewhere else. No big problem. We arrived, had no problems getting in, had a nice dinner, and as we returned, the concierge told us she had called them and told them that I had forgot to pack my shoes and asked them to make an exception.
The restaurant in Le Meridien, Aioli, was pretty good. Great lobster bisque, pretty good seafood. I got in wearing a hi-tech short-sleeve plaid polyester travel shirt, shorts, and running shoes. No problems with stuffiness there. It wasn't cheap though. Dinner for the 2 of us cost close to $200 including tips.
I was glad that I had read the other posted reviews and was forewarned about certain things:
1) Do not open the bath package. It will cost you $30 instantly. There must have been enough complaints about it for the management to put a little sticker on the package.
2) Do not connect to the high-speed internet service. I think there was a one-time $30 connection charge and a $25/day charge associated with it.
3) Mattresses are pretty hard. I like them that way, my wife was less sanguine about this.
4) Noises do echo a little more in the hallways because of all the interior marble but that didn't bother us too much.
Things that annoyed me a little:
1) Unpleasant attitude of the gift shop attendant. I had bought something (a guide book) and told her that my wife may not like it and would return it right away. She was nice selling it to me, but when I returned it, her entire demeanor changed. She slammed the cash register and wouldn't look me in the eye.
2) Sometimes there would be a funny smell in our room. Some of it I attributed to the fact that our clothes wouldn't dry after an outing (it was June and the humidity was incredible). But I think the other part of it was that there was a drain in the bathroom floor that was used when the housekeepers swept or mopped the bathroom. It was covered with a small grate and sometimes there was minor unpleasant odor eminating from it.
3) From other reviews, I knew there were a lot of charges. The silliest was that we needed the minibar fridge as a refrigerator to keep stuff like milk for the little ones. So they cleaned out the minibar and then charged us a $5/day "rental fee" for an appliance that was already there. I rolled my eyes at this.
4) The elevators were really hot. I don't think they air conditioned them.
5) No car service. Had to pay for transportation from the airport to the hotel and back.
What I really didn't like:
1) The travel agency. Sold us 3 packages. First of all they priced the packages in dollars and converted them to pesos at over the normal exchange rate. Then they billed it to hotel bill, which gave us a worse exchange rate from pesos to dollars. Someone pocketed the difference. Furthermore, my wife and I are pretty active independent travelers. When we have gone on tours before, we hired our own guides or pooled resources with a few other people and went as a small group. The descriptions that the travel agent in the hotel gave us were pretty off from the reality. First of all we were told to be in the lobby at around 7:30 in the morning. So we expected to be at the archeological sites in the mid-or late morning. Which would be smart thing to do in June. Wrong. We would spend up to an hour and a half picking up other passengers at other hotels. By the time we got to the sites it was around noon, in the near unbearable heat and humidity. Why not send small vans or cars to pick up passengers and then drop them off at a central location? On the Chichen Itza tour, for a majority of the time traveling to the site, the tour guides talked about tips and buying souvenirs such as translating certain important dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc) to Mayan dates on parchment, or transcribing words (names, initials, etc) into Mayan hieroglyphics engraved on silver or silver/gold pendant. Ugh. When we got there the guide, Ismail, just stood in the central courtyard. Didn't show us around too much. The third tour was a complete disaster "a tour of Isla Mujeres". It ended up being a ride on a ferry with the crew trying to get the passengers to participate in frat-house antics. When we got to the island we were pretty trapped in a beach resort with occasional options to go snorkeling or biking. I wanted to walk around town and wanted to leave but was told in no uncertain terms by a security guard that this wasn't going to happen.
2) Some really nasty attitudes of some other guests towards the staff. I was unhappy about the things above but I didn't take it out on the staff. The travel agency and tour operators were probably independent contractors. But everyone from the concierges, to the housekeepers, to the bellhops, to the pool, spa, and gym attendants were very courteous and helpful and knew our names. But I saw some real atrocious behavior by some of the guests. What is it with the palpable feeling of entitlement that some guests have? We were in a nice hotel on a beautiful stretch of beach, with this amazing turquoise ocean, and people were very helpful and courteous (with few exceptions). Couldn't people just relax???
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
xraydude888
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Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 3 members
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