🏝️ The resort tour from hell with a side of bacon
An amazing 5 star resort but ...
More Beware Resort Tours from being a Smart Travel Consumer.
This is a real experience I had in 2024.
I saw the deal on Facebook – $199 for a 5 day 4 night Cancun vacation at the Garza Blanca Cancun. It’s a new gorgeous all-inclusive 5* resort selling apartments. Sounds like a Vacation Steal, right?
It went downhill from there.
It looks too good to be true. What’s the catch? Of course, it required a tour. 🚩 OK, we expected and can handle that.
That was just the first of many red flags 🚩 that I’ll share here. I have an MBA, lots of travel experience. It didn’t help. You’d think I would have put the brakes on at some point. Nope, I can be as much an idiot as any travel virgin.
The actual price … I did not expect. The total amount I paid for the vacation was about $900 🚩, including reservation, booking, and hotel fees and taxes. So it’s not $200 for the vacation … but $200+ per night. No longer amazing, but I’d still call it a Steal for a luxury all-inclusive for 2. Plus they did give me an extra night at no added cost.
Monster Reservations, the marketing company, could only book us at certain resorts. That definitely did not include the Garza Blanca. 🚩 Plus the resort they did have had to have availability. The only 4* hotels they offered had atrocious reviews 🚩 (no wonder the resorts were willing to fill them with promotions). There was just one hotel that had generally good reviews, Cancun Bay Resort, a small 3*🚩 resort, 20 minutes from the Garza🚩, that I could have booked directly for a few hundred dollars more. OK, so not a steal. Let’s just call it a deal.
At this point though I was “in”. I had already paid a deposit and spent hours researching everything online and talking to the tour marketer. So I took that hotel, even if this wasn’t the luxury vacation they promoted. At least it was all-inclusive with good food, unlimited drinks, and two pools. It’s on the beach and next to Temptation Cancun, an adult “clothing-optional” resort.
The day of the tour:
Needed transportation to the Garza, a little sign that this was going to be a long day. A greeter met us with a taxi.
Our next visit and wait was at check-in.
15 minutes later we met our sales rep who took us to breakfast. The star of the meal - and the tour - was the bacon tower. (cue haunting music) A freaking tower. I should have known. Amazing AND scary. The fried, sizzling, artery-clogging bacon tower was the perfect symbol for our descent into the nether resort sales world.
Next was the tour of a few apartments and rooftop pool with inifinity pool looking out to the ocean and Isla Mujeres, truly spectacular. The disconnect between this 5* resort and the place I stayed in did not predispose me to make a purchase.
Then over to another building and the open sales room. Thankfully they served drinks. The obligatory bell was rung occasionally for (supposedly) closed sales.
There was the sales video.
A meeting with the sales rep.
A meeting with his manager
The visit from the sales VP 🚩.
Waits between all the meetings. Every time a better deal. That I could only buy today 🚩. I considered and declined all.
Finally we were directed to the transportation booker in a different building. He gave me the 4th sales pitch 🚩of the visit for a minideal to return next year. I think they were going to put me up in a tent in the jungle near Chichén Itzá.
Eventually we taxied back 🚩 to our hotel.
The sales tour was supposed to take 2 hours. It lasted 6 hours 🚩. The ordeal pretty much wasted the day. It also stole a part of our souls. 🚩🚩🚩
You have to ask yourself - Is all that worth it to save two hundred dollars and ruin a part of the vacation?