Hotel Playa Luxury Cayo Guillermo — Hotel in Morón

June 2025||Here are the pros and cons of Playa Luxury Cayo Guillermo. (Six months ago, it was known as Kempinski. It was not an all-inclusive resort at that time but was purchased by Gaviota. Information may not be 100% confirmed.)||Pros:|Private transfer from the airport directly to the hotel.||Fast and stress-free check-in, with no need to stand in line.||Immediate room access, even with early flights. (Note: This may change as occupancy increases.)||No late check-out fee — you can stay in your room until your private transfer pickup time.||Free laundry service (we didn’t use it, but the butlers informed us about this option).||Nicely designed rooms with large separate areas for the bathtub, shower, and toilet. Plenty of bath accessories provided.||Free 25-minute massage included — and it’s amazing. Extra time is available at US$44 for 35 minutes.||Clean and beautifully landscaped grounds.||Fully stocked minibar: always filled with beer, tonic, water, mango juice, guava juice, real Coca-Cola, and Sprite.||Food: For those familiar with Cuban resorts, this will be a surprise. We’ve been to Cuba over 20 times in the last 20 years, and we have never experienced food this good. While it’s not quite Mexican RIU Palace level, it outperforms many 5-star resorts in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic in some aspects. How they manage this despite Cuba's food supply challenges is a mystery — but they did it.|All meals are served à la carte. There is a buffet, but it's currently closed due to low occupancy (estimated at 15–20%).||Alcohol selection is outstanding — hopefully, they can maintain it. Current offerings include Hennessy XO, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Torres 20, Havana Club Selección de Maestros, Canadian Moosehead beer, and more. (Note: some premium options are only available at the cigar bar.)||Helpful and friendly staff. Not many speak English, but they try and are clearly learning.||Music: Thank you for keeping the hotel quiet and relaxing. Even if music is playing, it’s soft and pleasant, never loud.||Cons:|Although the hotel is advertised as 13+ only, local tourists with babies were staying over the weekend.||While the food is excellent, service is extremely slow. À la carte breakfasts (e.g., fried eggs) can take up to 45 minutes in the main restaurant. Our longest dinner/supper took over two hours.|After a few attempts, we started going to the snack bar, which is slightly faster but still slow.|The fastest service is at the beach bar during lunch.||Beach towels must be left in your room to be exchanged by housekeeping after 10 a.m.|If you go to the beach earlier, there's no place to swap them unless you call reception — and sometimes even they can't help.|The hotel is still new, and we hope General Manager Ignacio Cordero Regueira will address this.||Cigar shop: There’s only one, very small, shop on the property.|It carries a limited (and overpriced) selection of cigars. The clerk is often absent, and there are no price tags.|If you lucky and it's open, don’t be surprised if you’re quoted different prices for the same cigars you bought previously.|Staff say the shop doesn’t belong to the hotel.|However, if you want Cuban cigars, buy them there — because "something" seems to have happened at Cayo Coco airport, and all cigars are gone there. You may leave empty-handed if you wait.||Lack of beach security: Playa Pilar is a public beach, and many locals and tourists from other resorts freely enter and use the hotel’s facilities, including umbrellas.||Beach cleanliness: Because Playa Pilar is public, underwater garbage like beer cans, cups, and straws is noticeable while snorkeling.||There is plenty of space on the beach and around pools for now, but the hotel only has 30 umbrellas on the beach.|On our first day, almost all were already taken — and that was with only 15–20% occupancy.|At 30–40%, there will definitely be a shortage.||Mosquitos: Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo are known for them, but this year is particularly bad — especially in Cayo Coco.|Playa Luxury is a bit better located, but still has some mosquito issues, especially after rain.|We saw a fumigator only once during our stay.|Cayo Coco and the airport area looked like a horror movie at night — so check the season and bring extra-strong mosquito repellent, and lots of it. Locals need it too and ask for it.||Internet: Frequent dropouts for no apparent reason. Likely not the hotel’s fault, but frustrating.|Even with roaming, 50% of the time we only had "E" (EDGE) connection — no LTE or 3G.||Overall|We would rate our experience 5 stars for now — we were genuinely impressed, especially compared to other...

The week we spent at Playa Luxury was everything we needed and more. The experience completely exceeded our expectations.||Let me preface this by saying that both my husband and I are Cuban, and we’re very familiar with the current situation in the country. So, not finding something specific at the buffet, dealing with staff who might lack a bit of experience, or noticing that some parts of the hotel could use a little maintenance were things we were expecting.||We actually found the installations very well kept. Everything in the room and around the hotel was clean — especially the green areas, which had beautifully detailed landscaping. We loved having an ocean-view room; waking up and being able to look out at the sea was a magical experience. The room was very spacious, and our room attendant always made beautiful arrangements with the curtains, bedding, and towels.||Our favourite place in the whole hotel was the beach. When I say this is the most beautiful beach I have ever been to, I’m not exaggerating. It’s not a very large area, but the turquoise colours of the water on a sunny day look unreal, and the sand is so fine it feels like flour.||We spent most of our time at the beach, which is also why the beach bar was the one we frequented the most. The workers there took the absolute best care of us — their gin tonics and piña coladas are top-notch! They always greeted us warmly and even brought our meals and drinks right to the shore, making us feel totally spoiled in the best way. (Special thanks to Maray, Ismael, Jennifer, and Vitico!)||The workers at the Nautical Point took great care of us as well. They took us on catamaran tours to the Media Luna key, where we did some exploring and snorkelling. The trip to the remains of a ship near Media Luna was especially beautiful because of the many colourful fish and corals we got to see. There were also kayaks and water bikes available, and we definitely took advantage!||We also visited the spa for a couple’s massage, and Dahily and Yenjhany took excellent care of us.||There’s a specialty restaurant at the hotel called Tradiciones, and I wholeheartedly recommend dining there every chance you get. The service provided by Yunay was perfection, and Chef Raymel wonderfully reimagines Cuban cuisine — there was nothing we didn’t enjoy eating there!||One of the best nights we had was when we decided to “stop by” the cigar bar. Roberto and Felipe took such good care of us that they practically had to close the place with us still inside. They have an excellent selection of beverages and cigars there.||Another detail we really enjoyed was that during most mealtimes, there were always musicians playing at the Hemingway buffet and the beach bar. We especially loved the group of tres players performing traditional Cuban music one night during dinner at the buffet, and the electric guitar player doing classic rock covers during lunch at the beach.||Overall, we found the food to be quite good. For some reason, things like honey or ice cream were surprisingly hard to find, and the selection of vegetables and salads was definitely insufficient. However, there was always a great variety of cheeses, hams, and desserts, and always some form of fruit available.||Something to note is that not all three pools were available — only one was in use, while the other two were under maintenance. Also, for anyone trying to keep up with their workouts, the gym might be a bit disappointing. Aside from running, cycling, and doing a few upper-body exercises on the machines, there aren’t even any dumbbells...||All in all, the quality of our experiences throughout the week completely outshone the smaller issues I mentioned before. We’d go back in...

This is a very bad hotel located in one of the world’s finest beaches. The facility is in very poor shape: the rooms are poorly painted; the outlets and other connections protrude above the texture of the walls. In our room, 3105, the sink and the toilet were cracked, the bidet was loose, and the bathtub was dropping a synthetic coating that must have been applied not long ago. The bathroom curtain was very stained with black mold. On the other hand, the furniture in the room was considerably aged, and the mattresses had the foam uncovered, without appropriate linen. The air conditioner practically did not cool - the receptionist explained to us that they were already aging machines and of an inefficient technology for temperature in tropical climates. They sent a maintenance person that partially resolved the issue. The TV didn’t look good either, because of some false contact on the line. In our room as well as in the restaurant, we saw cockroaches. When we asked for the room to be sprayed, they sent us an employee with a small bottle sprayer that applied the product only on the spots where we told him we saw the roaches. In the restaurant, it was common to see dead flies falling into the glasses and dishes of the buffet service without anyone worrying about replacing the contaminated pieces. The hotel’s paint and decoration are very damaged, and to top it off they have painted it white and gray, apparently following silly and crazy contemporary fashions, so the resort looks like a large hospital, if not a funeral home. Many columns have lost the capitals, there are many damaged lamps in the hallways, and the spotlights that highlight the fountains have been replaced by energy saving bulbs – ridiculous. The swimming pool plastic cover has cracked in different places. The Melia Cayo Guillermo’s preposterous customer service made this one of the worst hotel experiences of our lives. I must point out that there were service employees that did provide a good customer service and made everything in their power to solve any issues and to make our experience more pleasant. However, it was horribly sad to notice that it seems like a common hotel practice to discriminate Cuban customers. Some employees’ demeanor toward Cuban tourists is definitely unacceptable. I had to call attention to three service employees for discriminating against me and favoring European tourists to the detriment of my own service, which I paid for as five stars. But it was more offensive to see their change in attitude when I told them that I did not live in Cuba – instead of using the tip as gratitude for good service, I had to use it to receive a slightly better attention. In the pool snack bar and beach bar there were no disposable cups, so the service was done in 4 Oz porous plastic cups that had to be reused. The clerks scrubbed these glasses in a basin, all with the same soap water, as was done in times of the worst crisis. A clerk at the beach bar, rudely and without even saying hello, yelled at me that I couldn't take my cups to the beach because they had so few. Other tourists claimed that they had paid for a 5-star hotel, and that the least they could expect was to be served on the seashore. At night, they usually ran out of many spirits and liquors, and there were only the lowest quality ones, since they only took out a single bottle for the entire hotel. Melia saved a few cents and I will save myself discomforts, because I do not plan to visit any of their hotels ever again. At the end of our stay we were not surveyed, unambiguous evidence that Melia does not give a damn about customer satisfaction, after they pay five stars to receive the worst customer...