Pueblo Bonito Pacifica Golf & Spa Resort — Hotel in Baja California Sur

I wanted to rate this overall as a 2. My wife wanted to rate it a 4. As usual, she's probably right but here's the tl;dr...

The property is lovely, the food is (mostly) great, and the service is top notch. But they screwed us over on our room reservation. We didn't get what we paid for and they did nothing to remedy the situation. I'm still livid.

Here are the full details:

Beautiful property with long expanses of (non-swimmable) white sand beaches. Lovely desert landscaping all around a property that didn't feel too big. Rooms all have at least some views of the ocean.

The pools are also lovely (with no sounds of children screaming a wonderful benefit) with excellent service. There was never more than a few minutes wait for a server to come around and, if you really got antsy, they have call buttons available at each umbrella stand. Most impressive to me was that there was no rush early in the morning to claim your spot at the pool. There were plenty of spaces available even as late as noon.

There are 3 restaurants on property at Pacifica but you can take their shuttles to other Pueblo Bonito resorts in town to eat elsewhere if you'd like. Please note, the shuttles to the Sunset resort and to the steakhouse at the golf course are very convenient with short rides. The shuttle to the Rose property on the other hand is a bit of a hassle and quite long. One of the Pacifica employees even warned us against making the trip. Anyway, back to the 3 on property restaurants. Siempre is their BLD choice and it had relatively good food. There's a breakfast buffet but you can also choose to eat off of a limited menu. We tried the buffet but then went to the menu for the rest of the trip. The buffet was...fine. Their lunch and dinner menus were surprisingly varied and the food was tasty. Ask for Alexis and Ariel.

Pescados is their Asian themed dinner place and it was delicious - just watch the spice on the ramen. OMGosh! Another great menu with wonderful taste profiles. Ask for Diana.

Peninsula is their other dinner restaurant and it is awesome (ask for Ricardo). Again, very varied menu and excellent food. They had an appetizer while we were there (9/24) which was, quite frankly, amazing. They called it Loreto Style Grilled Clam and it included bits of shrimp, squid and bacon served inside a large clamshell and presented on a smoker of burning (fill in something amazing here). Delightful.

Ok, so here's the big negative. There are 3 levels of rooms - regular, VIP and The Towers. This trip was for our 25th Anniversary so we decided to splurge and went with the Towers which included extra amenities. We used a 3rd party site to make the reservation but when we got there to check-in, we were "only" given VIP level, not the level we paid for. We questioned it at the time but were told we could not have The Towers. I eventually found my reservation which explicitly stated Towers and then confirmed with my 3rd party site that we reserved (and paid for) the Towers. When I showed these confirmations to our butler, the answer came back that we only had a VIP level and that we'd need to contact the travel agent ourselves.

Look, I don't know whether the screw-up was the fault of Pacifica or of the 3rd party. I may never know. My issue is that Pacifica did nothing to try to fix the problem. They essentially said to us, "not our problem, fix it yourself". Nor did they offer any kind of recompense. Paying almost $5k for a week there and not getting that simple respect is a deal killer for me. I will never go back.

We attended the timeshare presentation and eventually were offered a very good package. Very good.

But there was no way I was trusting an organization that had essentially either stolen from us, offered us no help or both. All of this negatively impacting our 25th Anniversary trip which I had wanted to be perfect...

Here is my brief summary. WAY MORE to it, but I will shrink it to fit. We got food poisoning the day before we had to leave (shrimp ceviche pool side restaurant/swim up bar). Had to cancel the return flights and stay one more day at our expense ($350 discounted from full rate) then the doctor to come check out wife and I ($350) and then we paid for a shuttle to the airport the next day (see below about that). I would however still recommend but I won't be going back again.

Things of note/good: -Drinks (even though I am not much of a drinker) were very good and strong. There are some reviews saying they weren't strong. Everyone in our group said they were good and strong, not sure why people said they weren't. We made sure we tipped as well. -Food was fantastic at all the property spots, Peninsula was amazing, and the sushi place was very good. -The issues with Quiviera are in my opinion overblown. Even though it's not all you can eat, the steak I had was plenty big, and I left very stuffed. It was all VERY delicious. Wife said the crab cakes were the best she ever had. -Pay to do the Papillion sailboat tour offsite. We had Cedric and Sergio I believe as our hosts. We did the package with the shuttle, worth every penny. It was unbelievable. HIGHLY RECOMMEND -Quiviera Golf course was bananas. Ocean side holes are breathtaking. Staff and food were very good as well. Worth the cost for sure -Pickleball was fun, as was pool volleyball with a bunch of random people. On the back 9 I drove a Par 4 green in one, then 3 putted for par. (I know...) it's the hard dog leg right hole. You can drive it, just do it... -Our rooms were mostly clean, someone else's hair in the bathroom that wasn't cleaned all week. We didn't complain, so no fault there, but the room was clean, bed was comfy, and always chilled. Fridge was ALWAYS stocked. We tipped the cleaning staff well.

Bad in addition to getting super sick... -THE FLIES... OMG the flies were EVERYWHERE. Not sure what they could do, but they were everywhere. As soon as you got your food, there were a minimum of 15-20 flies within seconds. -Paid $60+ for the shuttle to the airport, that had either dead or broken air conditioning. On a 91F day, and being sick, not fun. it was blowing warmish cool air if that makes sense. Had we not had cold waters with us, it would have been bad. We roasted in the car. -Concierge was mostly useless. Didn't do things we asked multiple times they said they would do. -Felt like after we got sick, service went downhill until we left -Room service was very hit or miss. Never got a single order right. Came quicker than they said, but it was never correct. -Coworker was JUST at the PB Sunset family resort next door, son had shrimp, got super sick. Not sure what is going on, but we didn't get sick eating sushi, but the shrimp got us both, exactly a week apart. -I felt like after we got sick service went backwards, which it should have been better since they we got sick from the food, issues with the room keys and getting assistance. -Trying to get the doctors note to submit for trip insurance/health insurance has been rough. but I think we got it after the 5th attempt...

So in closing, I would recommend going here, it was truly awesome until we got sick. Had the treatment been better after getting sick I would have still gave 5 stars, but that really bothered us. I waited to write this review as we got back home and took some time to recover, and wanted to be as fair as possible. If you don't get sick, it will probably be amazing, but if you do, your mileage may vary...

Edit, lowered score as I have called 4 times, and emailed, and still can't get a receipt for our stay so we can submit for the...

WARNING!!!! We just got home from our wedding at Pueblo Bonito Pacifica. Planning a wedding at this resort was stressful from the second we signed the contract. We wouldn’t hear back from our wedding coordinator Biani for up to 3 weeks at a time. They have an approved list of vendors you can use, but they require you to book the vendors through your coordinator, which is difficult when you don’t get email responses back for weeks and vendors availability goes quickly. We ended up reaching out to our photographer directly to book her since she has such limited availability, but then we weren’t given the $500 photography credit through the resort since we couldn’t keep waiting weeks for a response from our coordinator. We requested multiple times for a phone call during the planning process and never received a single phone call.ever. Eventually we asked for a new coordinator and we were not given a new one.

When we arrived to the resort, the nightmare continued. We had 78 guests come to our wedding and multiple guests were assigned to incorrect rooms (given a room with 2 queen beds when they actually paid for 1 king bed). The front desk said they fill the rooms on a first come first serve basis and not according to the room you actually book?? This was especially difficult for the elderly guests who then had to relocate all of their stuff to a correct room once we spoke up. The staff also insisted on delivering our suitcases to the rooms for us - sounds great! Well, they delivered the wrong suitcases to the wrong rooms multiple times. Again, more stress.

One of our guests (who is pregnant) had a water pipe burst in her room in the middle of the night, which got all of her belongings soaking wet and required her to pack up and switch rooms in the middle of the night. Water was literally POURING OUT OF THE CEILING... Then two hours before the wedding started, the groom's parents got a call that they needed to pack up their room and switch rooms because the bursted pipe is under their room and they need access to it. Again, more stress.

On top of all that, and honestly the worst of it all, 16 of our guests got HORRIBLE FOOD POISONING from this resort during the trip and were out of commission for over 24 hours. The groom barely made it to our wedding because he was so ill. My maid of honor had to leave the wedding early because she was so sick. Lastly, on wedding day, I (the bride) was told to wait in my room before the ceremony began and someone was going to come get me to help with my train and veil to escort me to the ceremony. Well, nobody ever came. It was at the point of the ceremony that I was supposed to walk down the isle when my wedding coordinator texted me “where are you 😅”…not exactly the calming words you want to hear right before your wedding.

Overall, we spent WAY too much money at this resort for the service and experience we had. There will also be extra fees that you were unaware of. We had $500 credit for fireworks as part of the promo when signing our contract so we signed up for fireworks. Well, apparently the credit only applies if you select the highest firework package available..which nobody ever told us.

On the bright side, our butlers Alberto and Hannia were amazing and really tried to help us out - they were the highlight of our trip for sure. But for the amount of money you’ll spend here, just plan your wedding elsewhere. Nothing was done to compensate anyone for the multiple inconveniences we all experienced. It should be illegal to call this place a 5...