The Westin Puntacana Resort — Hotel in Higüey

If you like a quiet peaceful resort with great service, nice pool, and a beautiful beach this is for you. If you enjoy activities, action, and something to do after dark, then this is not the place for you.|First thing you have to know is that this is not an all-inclusive resort. It has no activities, shows, or even (while we were there) entertainment of any kind. It is located in a gated community that has a golf club, another resort, and housing. There are also restaurants within the community outside of the Westin Resort that they will provide free (with tip) transportation to.||The Good:|- Service was excellent! I am so surprised after seeing some negative reviews about service. Everyone was amazing. Shout out to Frankie who was amazing and so helpful, Angel (who lived up to his name), Hector, and the bartender at the Cigar bar (I am so mad I forget his name. Awesome). Everyone was so helpful, friendly, and attentive. I never had to wait for a drink or felt nothing less than valuable. They always went the extra mile from the front desk, bartenders, servers, and Bell staff. The only blip was the towel stand attendants who seemed bothered.|- The pool is nice. Never had an issue getting a chair and servers were always wondering around taking orders. Drinks came out fast. No cushions on the loungers and pretty basic, but no biggie.|- The beach is nice with plenty of chairs and umbrellas. It has a nice dock out over the water. The water is beautiful with a sandbar out about 100 yards that if you are a strong swimmer can enjoy. (I will get to the seaweed which is not the hotels fault later).|- Lobby is open air and gorgeous. Check-in was efficient and friendly. The lobby bar is nice with great people.|- The Cigar bar was a great touch and the only place open late (midnight). Great drinks and affordable cigars. You get a free shot of rum with a Cigar purchase which was amazing. Bartender was the best. I mean he made our trip better. |- The hotel is literally 10 minutes from the airport but you wouldn't know it because it is in the middle of a nature preserve.|- Hint: You can enjoy the restaurant, pool, and beach at the golf club/Spa which is VERY nice with a spa treatment. They may let you hang if you just buy drinks. This beach had less seaweed then the Westin beach. It was also completely empty.|- Our room was spacious, bathroom was huge, walk in closet, and the heavenly bed. Actually had Westin products which believe it or not, many do not anymore.|- 24 hour room service and you can honestly get more authentic DR food from room service then the restaurants. Not kidding.|- Beach restaurant was good, but closed for dinner most of the time we were there. Bao the Japanese restaurant was good too.|- Do the Soana Island excursion. Unbelievable. |- Short cheap taxi ride to the Village and Downtown. Great proximity.||The not so Good:|- I like to relax, but not only relax..this place is kinda boring. Not even music at the pool. Thankfully we brought a blue tooth speaker. Not even a guitar player at night (We were there Sunday-Thursday). Everything closes relatively early except the Cigar Bar which is open till midnight. I liked having the run of the place, but it had to be 50% or less occupancy. Considering the lack of a lot of offsite action in DR, they should have at least a little something going on.|- SEAWEED - the Sargassum was very bad (apparently worse then ever this year). We walked out for the first time to the beach and it was like a kick in the B@lls. It looked like a swamp up until 20 yards out. They cleaned it off the beach, but couldn't do anything about what was in the water. It varied from day to day and times of day. There were days and times that you only had to wade thru about 10 feet of it to get to clear water. Every hotel dealt with this to some extent I think. The sad thing is that there is the beautiful sandbar right in front of you where boats stop and people are partying on it. So close but yet so far. My suggestion would be for the Westin to shuttle people out there to get away from the seaweed. |- Renting the non motorized water activities is not easy. You have to walk down the beach and they only offered part of what was available. We wanted a water bike to get out to the Sandbar and after an hour of walking around and asking.. nobody could tell me how to rent one.||I think the summer is off season and they were at a very low occupancy rate. Things were randomly closed and no action at all. Maybe there is at other times, but the place is really boring. Some people like that complete peacefulness and if that is you then this is your place. Be respectful to the staff and they will be amazing to you. Be aware that from now till August you will be fighting bad seaweed and those pictures you see on the website will look more like a swamp at times, but when it clears, the water is stunning. Overall, a great value for the money and completely broke the rep of bad...

If I were to sum up the service at the Westin Punta Cana in one word, it would be apathetic. They simply DON'T CARE about customer service. Period. Let's start with the resort itself and some of the positives, it is 6 min from the airport, the hotel itself seems to be in fairly good shape, not dated and property is generally clean. The hotel is situated around a very large pool and has a very large hot tub. The beach is just beautiful, white sands, clear blue water, all great for kids. Now for the not so good...Generally the feeling you get is that the people that work there simply do not care about customer service. I was a single mom traveling with 3 kids, ages 6-13 and I could probably count on one hand the number of people who seemed friendly or smiled at us in our 5 days there. I'd say the friendliest staff was the front desk/valets, that's about it. Housekeeping would leave dirty glasses in the room, or it seems sometimes they attempted to wash them but they would be smudged and clearly not clean, that is if they even serviced the room, as one of our days there we arrived at the room at 5:00 pm after a long day out to find it had still not been cleaned. Although we were told the hotel was at 100% occupancy, the pool/beach was maybe 25% full, despite that, it was nearly impossible to get anyone to come around and ask if you wanted a drink/food (at the pool, the beach never had anyone serving the whole time there). The pool service staff was mostly hanging around the bar and chatting amongst themselves, once in awhile coming by if you were lucky. Most of the time you had to walk up and put in your orders and wait, a very, very long time. Let's talk about restaurants, breakfast you can assume you are getting the buffet, they simply price everything (think $17 glass of OJ) to make it such that unless you are ordering toast, it doesn't make sense to order a la carte. In addition, you would be waiting forever to get your food, as you had to flag them down just for a cup of coffee, so better to fend for yourself at the buffet. In general, breakfast buffet was very good at least. As for the other restaurants, they all need reservations except for Arena, the one on the beach. Almost every meal would take forever to come and they would get the order wrong, I mean simple orders, like a margherita pizza and fish was ordered at the Grille, they brought my fish and a pizza full of toppings. I had to send it back, eat my fish alone while my kids waited another 20 min for a new pizza to be made. This was the experience over and over across all restaurants, the exception being Brassa, where we experienced good/fast service and very good food. The cherry on top of all of this was when my son got food poisoning after dining at Arena, this was after waiting nearly an hour to be seated at a seemingly half empty restaurant, waiting another 40 min to order food (one steak and chicken fingers), steak arrived for me while again no food for the kids. I gave my steak to the kids while another 30 min went by and their chingers fingers arrived. My son took 2 bites, said this is disgusting, so I took a closer look at it appeared the chicken was not fully cooked. Within 2 hours of dinner he was vomiting/diarrhea all night long. In a nutshell, I would never go back, I would never recommend to anyone. I prefer to spend my money where I actually feel like they want me there, where there is a culture of customer service being valued across all employees, where I feel welcomed and where I trust the consistency and quality...

My family and I stayed at the Westin Punta Cana for 3 nights and had different experiences on different things. I will break it down in details as follows:

The Good: Welcome drink was quite good and refreshing, hands down for whoever made the drink. so good!!!! Shuttle service is excellent, they can take you to the Blue Mall and restaurants nearby. There is also a grocery store at the Blue Mall if you want to grab snacks and soft drinks. Guests have free access to the Indigenous Eyes Ecological Reserve that has 13 freshwater lagoons. The hotel and take you there and back. My family and I enjoyed this activity so much and I highly recommended. Free biking activity, you can grab one of the bikes they have and bike around the community. The hotel room is enormous, the biggest I have been in North and South America. The design of the room is also well thought through. This hotel is in a gated community which made us feel very safe. Note: if you are taking an Uber, make sure to choose "Uber Select" so you can get back into the property from outside. (Regular Uber is not allowed in the community)

Things that need improvements: The food - prices on the property is quite expensive for the quality that you get. Our first meal at the Anani, the service restaurant on site, came up to $170 for 3 entrées and 3 desserts which we would not mind if the food is tasty. Unfortunately, the chefs may need more training and quality check needs to be in place. For example, one of the entrées, BBQ ribs were tough and appeared to have been sit out for a long time. The mashed potatoes that came with it tasted like burnt garlic. The other entrée, creamy rice with shrimps was bland. It would also be nice to have more food selections, dinner buffet, or even an afternoon tea option.

Service Time - our group (and other guests) waited a long time for the food or even just a bottled water with ice, considering there are so many staff standing around doing nothing.

Coffee Shop/Convenience Store - there is only one gift shop on the property and they only sell Pringles. The rest of the stuff they sell there is non-edible items. For a 4 stars hotel, it is a must to have a full service coffee shop that offers a variety of caffeinated drinks, non-caffeinated drink, soft drinks, and bakey items. This is where guests go to grab something easy when they do not feel as hungry to sit down somewhere to eat. My family and I had to take the shuttle service to the Blue Mall so we could grab snacks and drinks from the grocery store back to the hotel.

Activities for guests - other than the activities that I have already mentioned, the resort gets quiet after 8 pm. Something like Sip & Paint activity, ceramic making, etc. would be great.

Signs and Directions - please put up signs of how to get around. After my stay, I still have no idea how to get to the gym and where all the other restaurants are.

Thank you Mike, the manager, for all your help to in trying to fix the AC in my hotel room. I know that there are a few glitches on this trip, but you did your best to try to turn this around for me...