Royalton Splash Punta Cana, An Autograph Collection All-Inclusive Resort & Casino — Hotel in Higüey

Royalton Punta Cana review- Jan 6-13||Check in- Easy, quick they do put my husband and I in two queens, I was too tired to even care so I didn’t ask for king. No biggy.. he could have let us know where things were like give us a map. I had to ask him where is our room and he points me to the left . Ok don’t worry I will figure it out. The concierge brings me two other people luggage and quickly find ours within 10 mins. ||Bracelet - room key was perfect. Don’t have to worry about bringing with you as it’s clipped on your wrist. |All resorts should do the same. Loved this. ||Reservations - be better! Give us atleast 1 reservation at time of check in. The app doesn’t work, the Sunwing rep was no help at all! Consierge no help, they just want to sell you a time share. |Sunwing needs to drop this hotel as a partner if they can’t live up to their advertising of having a la cartes. ||Buffet - marche buffet. We are not picky at all. I had better buffets in Bucerius @royal Decameron. For example, they had a Mexican station and had a very small bowl of guacamole, pico which were always empty. I asked for more and waited literally 13 mins and I just gave up as my omelette was getting cold. Lunch time - meh, pizza, pasta, cheese, breads, leafy greens. Rice, some veggies. Could be better. ||Buffet Marche- not great. Service was brutal. Had to always ask someone for coffee/ water and a spoon for my coffee. They were annoyed everytime. We asked. No one smiles here and if you ask for something they look at you like we’re interrupting. Their processes could be better. For example- we seen one person stay the empty tables and then another person 5 mins later came to wipe it, then another person to set the table. ||Pool towels- first day no towels at 10 am, by 11:30 they had some. They need to manage this better as we quickly played this game and had 6 towels in one day. Give two towel cards to each guest at check in and go collect your towels. We seen so many people with 3-4 towels per Lounger. Some laying on the pool deck all soaked with no owner. ||The beach- yup had to get up early for a good spot. 4th day wow the water came up right to the wall and a lot of chairs were messed up. I think they lost a few chairs to the angry ocean. Beautiful beach! Loved this part of our trip. ||Drinks - I was delighted to see they brought you fancy plastic margarita, daiquiri cups for your drinks versus the ole plain 2 ounce plastic kids cup most resorts give you. This was nice to see. ||Sands bar - loved this bar, quieter, and the view omg it was amazing. Hugo and Yendi were awesome! They are the morning till 2 pm shift. They recognize us immediately after day 1 and always have smiles and make conversation with us. These guys were the only ones that were attentive. They made me a mean Ojo Rojo! Yummy!!! ||The bbq beside sands bar was very good also! Great food for a quick bite. Lines up quickly but worth it. ||Dips pool bar - very busy and needs more staff as there was always a long line. I recommend they have a water station so people can get refills on their own instead of waiting Inline. Staff- sometime you get a smile and sometimes not. Mostly not. ||Cafe- omg amazing.. we had several affogatos (ice cream and espresso) |Lattes also were great! Staff were so nice. These ladies were friendly and welcoming. ||Gym- not a bad gym at all. Got a few workouts in at 8 am and not too busy. Friendly staff to. ||Lower Outdoor sitting area by lobby. - beautiful area. At nighttime it needs lighting around the trees to light the area up. It’s quite dark at night. ||Lobby bar- love this bar early evenings, the view is spectacular and the breeze is nice reprieve from all day of sun. Lobby bar drinks were good. ||Sports bar- great spot to watch your sports. Snack foods were good. Bbq ribs not good at all. The wings were just like in Canada. ||Casino- holy crap , $20 minimum to play the outside roulette table and $10 inside is absurd!! They could have made a lot of money from us if they had a $5 minimum. Didn’t spend one dollar there. Crazy. Vegas you could find $5 tables. (Still shaking my head) ||Royalton app- The app doesn’t work for making reservations, but if you enhance your booking with a cheap wine then it will show you all the available times. It’s funny how that works. Also you walk by these restaurants and you see alot of empty tables and wonder why you can’t see any time slots. This resort is all about upselling so be aware. You walk out of your room and they get you, they ask if you heard of 600 and you will get a gift. Ya the gift of listening to their upsell for a timeshare. Oh and the fact that they want to see your id and a credit card is so absurd. Hello, I have my key card bracelet that is attached to my id and visa. You don’t need to see that. They need to leave guests alone!! If guests want a timeshare they will find you. Never been so turned off at a resort before. What a frustrating vacation. The service was not good at all. ||A La Cartes- We did have a 2 good servers that were good. Our fave restaurants were |Grazie (cannelloni and fried cheese were awesome) |Under the sea (splash)|Zen tappenaki (great interactive experience) ||P.s the time share guy did tell us the app is designed to be like this as it’s to get people to sign up for the Diamond club. However, our friends stayed at the Diamond club at splash and they had a butler that told them that he doesn’t book the restaurants and they had to do on app. It was only another guest that told them about the enhance your booking with a cheap wine and were able to book in some a la cartes. ||Room sensors- if you have a C-pap machine be aware. electricity shuts off if you don’t move throughout the night.||WestJet Sunwing Vacations Royalton Punta Cana you need to do better! Give guests an a la carte booking at the time of checking in. This resort could be amazing. Quit with the upselling of diamond club ! We paid good money and if we wanted diamond club we will buy it when we booked. ||Check out- asked for a manager business card and the manager came which he could care less to hear our issue with the electrical issue for my husbands c pap machine. ||Overall beautiful resort, however it could be a 5 star if they gave guests at least 2 a la cartes at time of check in, staff bit friendlier, and stop with the time share hustling. People come to relax and not have to deal with over pressuring for a timeshare! They literally came to our door after day 3 and my husband said I was in shower and we will come see him later, he came back in 10 mins with me just got out of shower still in a robe. I was not impressed and spoke to him...

So first of all, there are two properties: the Royalton Punta Cana ("Royalton") and the Royalton SPLASH Punta Cana ("Splash"). They are right next to each other with the major difference being the Splash property has a small waterpark on the premises and the Royalton has the beach access. GUESTS FROM EITHER PROPERTY CAN USE ANY OF THE SERVICES/FEATURES/AMENITIES FROM THE OTHER PROPERTY. So you can stay at the Royalton and use the water park at the Splash, etc. To make things even more confusing, there are different tiers you can book: Diamond Club ("DC") and Hideaway. Each offering specific, exclusive benefits. I booked a basic, diamond club room at the Splash because at the time of booking I wasn't sure about the locations of the properties, use of amenities, etc. ||I am not sure which property was built first, but the infrastructure at the Splash seems older, more dated, and run down. Water would pool in the bathroom due to poor design and workmanship. Lots of patched holes in the stonework. Along with the poor ventilation, there was always a low level, musty, sewer smell. The walls and doors seem paper thin as we heard every toilet flush of neighboring rooms and anyone talking in the hallway. Because we were diamond club, we had a butler to help us, his name was Reinaldo. He was absolutely instrumental in securing dinner reservations!!!! The only other DC perk worth mentioning is the diamond club lounge used for check-in/-out. When I checked in, there was no signage or anyone to direct me, so it was a bit of a s#!% show, until we were directed to the club lounge. ||The buffet at the Splash was HORRIBLE, I cannot emphasize that enough, the buffet at the Royalton is relatively much better in terms of quality and selection. Same with the coffee shop at both properties, the Royalton was much better. In fact, comparing the two, the Royalton was the better property overall. The Royalton even had more restaurants than the Splash, including a sports restaurant, a steakhouse, and two asian restaurants. Making reservations at the restaurants was next to impossible without the help of our butler. The app the resort wants you to use was completely and utterly useless! According to the app, all the restaurants are only open 1-2 days/week! On our first day there, I tried using the app to book ANY restaurant for our 4 days there, I was only able to find one available reservation for our entire stay. We tried both the buffets, the steakhouse, the seafood restaurant on the Splash property, the Italian restaurant on the Royalton property, and the burger cart near the beach. The seafood restaurant was our favorite in terms of taste and service with the burger cart coming in second.||Speaking of service, the staff is VERY gratuity oriented, i.e. a majority of the servers, and the country in general, are expecting tips so bring cash or stop by a an ATM. I tried getting change from the staff in the Diamond Lounge, like a guest did the day before. To my great surprise, they weren't able to open the safe...WTF? While we are on the subject of service, with the exception of a few, overall it was pretty bad. For example, my phone got wet and broke early on during our stay. When I asked the concierge of our building to contact our butler, some didn't know his number, others acted annoyed because we interrupted them. Even our butler Reinaldo, although he knew my phone did not work, he never reached out to me via note on the door, voicemail, etc to see if I needed anything or to help make reservations. After a certain time in the evening, no one staffs the front desk. For an "upscale" resort the poor service was very surprising.||The gym, casino, spa, and theater were also located at the Royalton. There is a shuttle that travels back and forth between the two properties. You think that the hotel would have REGULAR, SCHEDULED shuttle service, but nope. Sometimes the wait is long, sometimes short. If the shuttle is full by the time it reaches your stop, the your are either waiting some more or walking. ||The arcade was nonexistent as was the teen club. The kids club was open but there weren't a lot of kids there , none of the kids club activities involved a trip to the waterpark or escape room or the beach. Due to all this I would have felt very guilty just leaving my child there. The pools at the Royalton always seemed very warm, it made me feel as if I were swimming in a petri dish. Beach and pool chairs are somewhat limited, but we were always able to find some unoccupied ones. What was limited were chairs in the shade. The beach was a bit odd as it is eroding. So there were these ginormous sandbag structures to prevent that, thus preventing any beach volleyball or sandy beach what so ever. There are sections of the beach "reserved" for DC guests, Splash guests, and Hideaway guests. But no on really checked our bracelets, so you are free to wander. The water activities building was located on one end of the beach, instead of centrally. There were hobie cats and kayaking, as well as motorized boat rides, parasailing for a fee, I think. Again, poor signage, so costs and types of activities were difficult to determine. There was a floor mounted fountain at the Royalton, the type you find a water parks, that we found very fun to play around, but an employee told us to stop. ||The highlight of the stay was the spa. They offered parent-child massage sessions which I thought was a very nice touch. But this was too little, too late. Although the spa met expectations, just about every other aspect of the resort: facilities, food, service, rooms, were all very disappointing. If I had to do it over, I would have either avoided this place altogether or stayed for a much shorter time. ||On a side note, I wanted to talk about the $600 resort credit comes with certain offers. The way it is described, I (along with others apparently) thought it was $600 we could use for different activities, spa treatments, etc. It is $600 worth of COUPONS for various things, including a room upgrade. You get this book AFTER checking in and talking to your personal butler, so if you are going to use it for the room upgrade, you shouldn't unpack. The coupons were pretty useless, for example, the spa manager gave us a larger discount than the spa coupon offered! What a joke! To add insult to injury, when asking for these coupons, they try to sign you up for a time...

We were there over the new year holiday as a family of 4, girls aged 12 and 15. We met another family there. We were diamond club.||The resort had some positives and negatives. I'll start with the positives...the grounds and pools were well kept. Our room was cleaned very well everyday and had everything we needed. The beds and pillows weren't the most comfortable, but the AC worked well so we were able to get a good nights sleep. The water park was fun for the kids. It was much more crowded in the morning, but in the afternoon our girls were able to enjoy it with little lines. Our girls wished there would have been a lazy river too, but we obviously knew there wasn't one going in. The beach was nice and you are able to go for long walks. There are some waves there so you can't casually swim, but our kids were old enough that they enjoyed playing in the waves and we felt they could do that without any supervision.||In the neutral items, service was hit and miss. Going to the breakfast buffet around 10 when it was busy was definitely the worst. One day we didn't get drinks! Other than that, bartenders around the pools and beach were pretty good and at the ala carte restaurants service was good. Since we were diamond club, we were able to enjoy the diamond club pool and were glad we could usually get chairs there (more on that later). The only downside of the diamond club pool is that most of the loungers were shaded and we wanted to get some sun.||On the negatives, I know we were there during the holidays so I'm sure it was busy, but the lack of chairs and/or availability at the beach and main pool was ridiculous. I know this happens at a lot of resorts, but I'm an early riser and the one day we wanted to hang out at the pool. At 7:20 I got the last chairs! Of course, there were only like two people actually sitting in any of the chairs, but I made sure to stay and since we were there with family friends we alternated families going to breakfast. The beach chair saving didn't seem as bad, but you still needed to be there fairly early to get a decent spot. In the diamond club section of the beach I think the beach butler would put towels on chairs and then for a tip he would get you chairs. The frustrating part is people were so inconsiderate once they were done with their chairs. We saw most of the time people would leave towels on the chairs in the afternoon, but never come back. ||We also had hit-and-miss service from our butlers. Our butlers didn't really tell us about all the services we should get as diamond club, so we had to ask. We had to ask them about getting a liquor bottle for our room. We were supposed to get beach bags, and requested them, but they said they were out (we saw others with them). We had to ask about the spa services. The only thing they were helpful with was making restaurant reservations. We had to use our butlers instead of the app if we wanted to get reservations together with our family friends. They did come through almost every night with a reservation for us, but numerous times we didn't know what our reservation was until late morning/early afternoon that day. Plus, we told them from the start Zen was our #1 choice, and they finally got us a reservation, but not until 9:30 (we actually got seated at 10:05!). ||The worst part of the resort, by far, was the food. We've been to probably about 10 all inclusives and this was tied for the worst food. The buffet was hardly edible, and that's the only restaurant open for breakfast and dinner. The ala carte restaurants didn't impress. Our friends went to the seafood restaurant and enjoyed, but that was the only one they liked. On top of that, we had 3 family members get sick during the week. Our daughter was throwing up for 2 days early in the week. On our last full day there, our friend woke up sick and was miserable the whole day. She went to the doctor a few days later once she was home because she wasn't getting much better and found out she had e coli! Our other daughter was throwing up the day we got back so either got something there at the last breakfast/lunch or maybe on the way home.||So overall, I wouldn't recommend. Maybe outside of the holidays if it was at less capacity the pools, beach and waterpark would make up for all the negatives, but the food was so bad we just couldn't...