Punta Cana Princess — Hotel in Higüey

The hotel has had a lot of videos on YouTube, a lot of comments both pro and anti across the various social media platforms, so my thoughts are@||We are just back (in the UK) having spent 11 days/10 nights at the PCP. Mostly good experiences. Some not so, some of which were under the control of the hotel, some nothing they could do about.||General Points: |The roads into the hotel are dreadful. We complain bitterly about the state of roads in the UK, but these have us knocked into a cocked hat.||The lobby. |A power failure when we arrived meant checking in took a little longer than it should have done, but it was ok.||Outside of their control but significant. |Nothing they could do about the sargassum problem that almost the entire Caribbean is suffering with at the moment. On arrival there was a London bus sized pile of the stuff, where they had clearly been making an effort to clear the beach, it wasn't totally successful. It smells too.||Within three days, working mostly but not exclusively overnight, the pile went and the beach wasn't too bad. Certainly a place where one could sit, enjoy the warmth, the sea and the ambience. There were other locations that were better, and some that were not.||Good points: |Great staff for the most part, a couple of problems with our room were quickly attended to, one must accept that things can go wrong, but it's how the hotel react to them that is important.||The Animation Team came across as two distinct teams. Julio and Francis were enthusiastic, clever and inclusive. Not too much pressure to join in but spoke in a number of languages to keep everyone involved.||The other half, the girls on this occasion, were much more suited to a kids resort. Loud, spoke almost entirely in Spanish, with little effort to bring the US/Canadian/UK/Italian/French into the party.||The Location. On the Atlantic side of the island, there's a constant breeze, which with the ambient temperature of 30-33c, was welcome. Weather apps showed that there would be rain every day. In reality, whilst I suspect there was rain somewhere on the island, we saw very little. What we did see were short spells, on one occasion, very sharp thunderstorm, knocking the power off for a few minutes but there were a few showers overnight, don't care :)||Food: For the most part, better than expected but not much better than average across the board. The a la carte options, La Petite Fondue, the best on site and worth a visit. The Tex/Mex (steakhouse) was ok. The beach side Mare Nostrum whilst billed as a 24 hour outlet, wasn't really, but was a regular stop for a light lunch, with a 24hr bar too. The Italian outlet was poor. A simple mistake such as an ordered chicken salad arrived, with everything except the chicken! ||Other Options: |We had full access to the sister hotel next door (Tropical Caribe Princess). We enjoyed the Japanese offering (TAO), all spatula throwing and flames, and reasonable food too.|We also reserved the Brazilian restaurant (FOGO) - you have to reserve the off site options, on site required no reservations - but with no indication of what to expect, it was, like getting into the place, only slightly organised chaos. A lot of locals simply pushed past to get themselves checked in - a needless rudeness as there were plenty of seats. Anyway, it was a QR code menu, but little to actually chose from. Starters were dropped on the table, 'fittings' or sides likewise and then various meats arrived "on sword", the cheaper options of sausage, chicken and pork being the first three, before the steak appeared. This in itself wasn't a problem, we have a chain in the UK. Casa Brasilia, same format but the chain do it with so much more flair and presentation. The overwhelming problem for me was the noise. Poor acoustics and large groups sort of overwhelmed after the calm and peace of our own resort. My problem I guess, not theirs. We left at this point - mostly the noise, but we were simply full. No idea how much more there was, but it seemed a popular choice to those there.||Bars:|The beachside bar had been much vaunted on the socials but we found it disappointing. The drinks seemed odd. We only went twice, second time to prove that it wasn't a bad day.||The Mare Nostrum bar was fine, the Casabe (main focus, buffet restaurant) was ok but the Lobby bar was by far the best. Time taken to present the drinks neatly, properly, friendly helpful staff and a cool environment to enjoy a glass or four.||Customer Services:|Miguel was a star! Quick to respond, advise and assist. Thank you. remembering our names each time, was a nice touch. He was the one that had decorated our room with balloons, left a platter of fresh fruit and a bottle of champagne in our room as we arrived on my wife's birthday. Thank you.||Concierge:|For the most part, helpful, friendly and responsive. One or two may be having a bad day, but seemed to struggle to smile or make you feel welcome.||Chambermaids:|Efficient, pleasant and responsive to the occasional request.||Overall. |We were looking for a nice beach. This can't be ticked but couldn't be the hotel's problem. nature had a controlling hand in this.|We were looking for calm and peace. Tick|We were looking for a nice pool. 80% tick... it needs a little refurbishment, and I personally found the maximum depth of 1.2m a little shallow for swimming. Not sure why so shallow, as it's exclusively adults only, but I guess the ocean is 80m away, just on this occasion it seem to be filled with seaweed during our visit. |We were looking for warm. Boy, big tick.||Would I go back. Yes, absolutely.||Now, it is often that someone is briefed to respond with cut and paste answers, saying how glad they are for the review, sorry that X, we will do Y, etc. To the person tasked with this. Please don't do that. If there are improvements, please do them but no patronising meaningless...

As mentioned in other reviews, the air conditioning didn't work. My air conditioning didn't get below 26 degrees Celsius, but with the ceiling fan over the beds, the temperature was comfortable enough to sleep. (The fleece blankets as part of the bedding were laughable, though - no air conditioning in the resort is working, but sure, let's keep the fleece blankets on the bed!) The mattress was very firm. My room had two twin beds, which were on rollers, and rolled. Apparently the DR has earthquakes not infrequently, so I went to bed every night hoping my bed would be in the same place when I woke up.

Also as others have mentioned, there were bugs in the room. I only had a couple small ones, though, and a couple mosquitos. In preparation for my DR trip, I saw to bring bug spray - you don't expect to have to spray yourself before bed in a "five star" hotel, but at least I had the option. I watched one bug scurry under the closed door, which suggests that perhaps some of the bugs could be mitigated by adding door sweeps.

There was one available electrical outlet in my room, and it was in the bathroom. I had to unplug the coffeemaker to plug my multi-charger in. There were two wiring boxes that COULD have been plugs, but were just bare wires with a cover on them.

There was a sign on the mirror saying not to drink the water from the sink. I knew from my trip prep that this would be the case (the internet says don't brush your teeth with the sink water!) but for some reason hoped that a five star resort would have filtered water taps in the rooms. Nope. Bottled water is plentiful though.

My room wasn't ready when I arrived, so I had to wait about half an hour. I think they took me to my room around 4:15pm? After decompressing for a few moments, I put on a swimsuit and went to find a towel... but towels are only available til 5pm.

The "free" wifi requires you to give them your email address so they can send you ads. No thanks. 4Mbps is not a good exchange for my personal info.

You can make reservations for dinner at the sister resort... but they don't have menus. If you want to see the menus, you have to download the app. I'm not gonna download an app for that. Put it on your website. Have copies available at the front desk. There's absolutely no need to gatekeep that information behind some dumb app.

There were also two different ceiling leaks in my room - one of which was every 2 seconds directly over my toilet, which meant I couldn't use the toilet without having mystery liquid dripped on me. They sent a nice maintenance engineer after a few hours, but the leaks recurred the next day.

The last thing was also the funniest - I called it the shower nurple. I truly enjoyed seeing staff's faces when I showed them photos of the broken fixture. I mitigated this by putting a bandaid over it so it no longer spat hot water at me.

The buffet food was overall fine. If I had one complaint about the buffet, it would be that there wasn't much actual Dominican food available. It'd be nice to have a dedicated station with Dominican food, since we're in the Dominican Republic.

It did all feel very lowest-bidder food, though. There was nothing really that said "we caught this this morning" or "we got this at the fish market down the road". A lot of seemed to be heat-and-serve. The fajitas were advertised as "peppers and onions" but were actually a paltry amount of meat cooked with what appeared to be the contents of a bag of Asian stir-fry vegetables - no peppers, LOTS of cabbage. For some reason, every dish at the restaurants, no matter what the dish, was garnished with alfalfa sprouts.

The seaweed mitigation really left something to be desired. Instead of tractoring it all away, they hook up a giant lawn-mower type thing to the tractor and "mow" it. It smells bad. People at the pool would go "What is that smell?"

If you're coming to this resort, bring a water bottle with a good filter, some bug spray, and a good handheld fan. Download the Spanish language dictionary for offline use in...

Full disclosure: the following review is a bit lengthy, but it's worth the read if you intend to visit this resort!!

We visited the resort last year and on our first night, we were pressured to write a 5 star review of the hotel in front of the animation team. I would advise potential review readers to take the 5/5 reviews with a grain of salt.

The hotel claims to be a 5 star resort but it's a 2 or 3 star at best. While the beach, drinks and daytime weather are AMAZING, the rest of our experience was atrocious.

The rooms are extremely outdated and falling apart. The bathroom faucets and fixtures are rusting to the point of crumbling, the toilets barely flush and the shower clogs anytime you shower, meaning your entire bathroom basically gets flooded. You'll also be lucky to get a weeks worth of hot showers (we had to take multiple freezing cold showers due to their hot water issues).

Our screen door broke on day two and the entire metal siding broke off. The glass was starting to break. They fixed it eventually by adding one screw and calling it a day. Our room smelled musty and moldy and our headboard REEKED of B.O and mold. They did nothing to fix this or clean it.

The hotel is falling apart, chips and cracks in the wood, siding, floors and ceilings. The cleaning is horrible (I dare you to look under your pull out couch, or behind the mini fridge), and all of the bedding and curtains are stained with mystery stains.

We were on the bottom floor of building #1 and our second day we found cockroaches near the bed. We spoke to guest services for at least an HOUR before they acknowledged an issue. They told us that because it was past 5 o'clock, they had no cleaners who could make us up another room. Really??? We saw about 20 cleaners that night. They said they was nothing they could do and we'd have to deal with it. After much discussion we asked to speak to the hotel manager, and within 2 minutes they magically had another room available for us.

This rooms key card swiper was broken and we then had to wait over an hour to get it replaced completely. When all was said and done we had to cancel our paid excursion an we are not out $350 that won't be refunded.

We moved into this new room and within one day, found more cockroaches. In both instances, they advised the hotel guests in adjoining rooms that they wanted to fumigate... for mosquitos! While I appreciate the attempt to control of cockroaches, the hotel should not lie to other guests and should be transparent.

They claim to have 24/7 help at the front lobby but when we found cockroaches the second time, around midnight, the person at the desk was on his phone and said two words to us, basically saying "no one is here to help you so come back tomorrow morning".

We went to speak to the guest services the next morning and there was nothing they wanted to do. They literally said "yeah, there are cockroaches every hotel in the world, if you don't bother them they won't bother you". What?!?!? We eventually ended up shaking out all our luggage (again!) And slept with the lights on as I know cockroaches don't like the light and we're less likely to come crawling around. We never moved rooms again because we didn't want to spend our entire day arguing with the hotel guest services.

Now that we're home, we have to leave all our belongings outside for a few days to ensure we didn't bring home any cockroaches or pests that could invade our home.

The beach is located on or near a public beach so there are people coming up to you about every 10 minutes trying to sell you things and they are relentless! We also had a hotel staff try to sell us Marijuana and cocaine.

We understand these things happen some times, but the absolutely horrendous customer service, the borderline falling apart and gross rooms, the lack of accountability, gaslighting and reluctance to help paying guests have made up our minds that we will never be...