Villa La Estancia Beach Resort & Spa Riviera Nayarit — Hotel in Nayarit

I should be giving 1 star, but I'm being nice. I am currently sitting in my hotel room at Villa La Estancia writing this review. I am very disappointed because I wanted to really like this hotel. Upon arrival the hotel looks very nice and you are greeted with a drink and a cold wet towel to cool yourself off. We checked in, had two rooms reserved for 4 people. After we were assigned a room we were approached by Astrid, whom proceeded to explain about the different amenities that the hotel had to offer. After about 30-40mins of explaining each and every amenity and their hours of operation she hit us with the timeshare presentation (which by the way she made it seem that it was a presentation about the different activities that we could purchase, like zip lining, atv tours etc.) that also came with a free buffet breakfast and other "free gifts". When we arrived to the room the bell boy was very humble and explained once again the amenities they had to offer. As soon as he left we sat down on the couch and bed to relax after a long trip and get ready to find something to eat. Within seconds we could feel that the blankets, sheets, and couches were damp. Then we observed that there was wet marks dripping from underneath the wall paintings and AC vents and the floors were wet. We waited almost 30 mins before we decided to call the receptionist to explain the problem and they said they would be right up to address the issue. After waiting a very long time with no one to give us a solution we called again and this time we spoke with a second person, they too said they were going to try to see if they could have the sheets changed and address the issue. After almost 2 hrs of waiting and multiple calls to the receptionist and waiting for someone to come look at the issue we decided to walk down stairs and talk to someone in person. Mind you we were already tired and just wanted to rest and shower after our long trip and we needed to know whether or not we would be moving rooms. Once we went downstairs to speak to someone they finally walked upstairs with us to the room. Christian proceeded to give us a lecture on condensation and said it was probably because housekeeping left the back door open when cleaning the room therefore creating the condensation in the room. He then offered to have them change the bedding, which we immediately were not satisfied with because the bedding wasn't the only thing that was damp. He finally told us he would try to see (but not guaranteed) if he could get us a new room. Meanwhile he told us to go find something to eat while he figures it out. Few hours later we returned and he gave and showed us two rooms that we could chose from and made it sound like they were giving us an upgrade, which they weren't, the rooms they offered us were the same size as the previous one just on a different floor. Finally we we chose one of the two rooms he showed us. This is our second day in this room and slowly the room is smelling more and more like old furniture that has been sitting in a very moist room with no ventilation. The bedding does not and did not smell clean (like bleach) like all hotel bedding smells like. One of the pillow cases has what looks like mascara stains on it and the lamp post and clocked has collected dust that obviously hasn't been cleaned in a while. This place was a huge disappointment! The rooms have ZERO humidity control and the only way to try to fight the old house smell, and humidity is to blast the AC 24hrs of the day, which isn't very pleasant when you want to try to stay warm at night or even during the day. Thanks for reading! I hope if you decide to stay here that you have a much...

PROs: Roberto, Fabio, and Daniel * if I can give Daniel 5 stars I would* CONS: 1. Upon checking in they say meet with "OUR" sales team to go over the hotel and then they sell you products, they told us we would get 4 massages and 8 city tours after to do their breakfast and sales pitch Bianca quoted us 90 minutes, they actually kept us there for 3 hours, with no voucher to any of the promised items. Our room: we had the 3 bedroom suite the hot tub jets partially worked and the temperature would not go up. Then when maintenance arrived at 10p when we were trying to use it said it would take up to an hour. I advised just come back the next day and they did and were able to resolve it the issues got MOST of the jets working, and then the water was scorching hot, we couldn't get it down. We thought it was user error but even the maintenance couldn't when we called again. Next our bedsheets had makeup, mascara and some odd stains, there was stand in our sheets along with glitter in 2 out of the 3 rooms. We got housekeeping to give us new sheets and we changed them ourselves. They claim to have 4 restaurants on property they do not. Flamingo next door has 3 restaurants a Mexican, Italian and Japanese restaurant. If it rains the outdoor Italian restaurant remains closed. The Japanese restaurant requires reservations as does Steakhouse at La Estancia. The do not have very much vegetarian options ( we asked) they gave us rice and potatoes in the buffet. Oh also to include you get a side of flies in the meals as the nest on the food. When asked by wait staff for something different as a veggie option they brought out boiled noddle's with no sauce. WOWWWW... Chef cant throw anything together for our single vegetarian friend great.... Patricia the " Manager" at La Estancia ensured us she would take care of all our issues and she issued a $500USD refund which is horrible considering we paid $7k for the 3 bedroom suite. What was the most disrespectful part of the trip was Patricia and Bianca. When I advised to Bianca that I spent my Thursday morning in their sales pitch that took longer than 90 mins she said look I just work here I cant do anything for you. Dont get mad at me I cant tell you what they do. When I bring this to Patricia she told me there are separate from the hotel they are the sales team but as you remember upon checking in they tell you to visit Bianca and "concierge" to get more information and they all wear The Villa Group shirts so they clearly dont work as a team. They claim all inclusive alcohol and food but the bar on the La Estancia side wouldn't open until 6pm as the Steakhouse did, you had to go to the swim up bar which opened at 11:30am to get alcohol. ( we are here to turn up and have fun) I should have to go to the pool to get alcohol. They failed to provide us with bath mats and two of us fell in the shower which we told Patricia and she SHOWED NO CENCERN FOR INJURY. On Friday at 10:30am we checked with Patricia letting her know $500 USD was not acceptable for the amount of inconveniences we have been having and she assured us she would get with her manager and get back to us tomorrow ( Saturday). Can you guys guess what happens Saturday... SHE DOESNT WORK and wont be back til Monday and we check out Sunday. Alma another manager WHO HAD NO CLUE had to be looped in and then when she was told she couldn't do anything without a manager. Like why would I waste my time to tell you for you to tell me that?!? They also would not give us an itemized receipt upon check out nor our documentation that we signed upon checking in that gave us the rules which they failed to mention that TIPS ARE INCLUDED with the All...

First, I am never traveling outside of the United States without everyone in the group having the COVID vaccine. It is just too stressful trying to figure out how to get back in the country if someone has caught the virus or presents with the virus.

The hotel was very spacious and very nice. The staff were very nice as well. There were some definite problems though. As I kind of hinted in the opening paragraph, someone in my group did test positive for COVID. We were then quarantined to our room until we could get her retested and hopefully, get a negative result. So out of a 4 day vacation, we spent 27 hours in our room with essentially 2 days ruined. The member of our party did test negative so thankfully, we did not have to stay longer or try to drive a rental car through Mexico. First, the hotel received the results before we did so I guess HIPA rules don’t apply in Mexico. The hotel scheduled another test but did it late the next day. An early test would have not ruined a full day of our vacation. They scheduled the test at 5:00pm and basically made us spend a full day in our room. You might think that the hotel would try to compensate for the stress, inconvenience, and pretty much ruining our vacation. Nope. The hotel apologized but didn’t do anything (well they paid $30 for the second covid test). They offered to maybe upgrade our room next time we stayed but I am not ever going back to this resort. To be fair, it wasn't all their fault but they had the power to make our vacation as good as possible under the circumstances and they chose not to.

I also need to talk about the wifi. The wifi was intermittent and overall very poor. Cell service (T-mobile at least) was 3G most of the time. I did find a spot to set my phone by the window where I could get 4G and then use it as a hotspot. So if you want good wifi, good luck on getting a room where you can get it.

The room itself was nice and huge (over 2,000 square feet). The air conditioning did not function in one of the bedrooms. It took us a day or so to figure it out. The hotel never sent anyone to work on it. The quarantine may have impacted their ability to look at the air conditioning but they never bothered to follow up. The air conditioning was also suspect in the main room. It never was hot but never good cool as well. We only know that it was fully functioning in one of the bedrooms.

There are not a lot of restaurant options at the resort. The breakfast buffett was good and the Mexican food restaurant was great. The Italian restaurant at the sister resort (Flamigos) was impressively bad. The clam linguini had clams with grit. Luckily, the resort is relatively close to town so we walked to town for a meal. We would have walked another night but the quarantine made that infeasible.

Overall, the trip was the highest stress vacation I have ever taken. Not quite the hotel’s fault but they made no effort to help improve...