Dreams Aventuras Riviera Maya — Hotel in Quintana Roo

Flight||Flew with BA in economy, flight and food was good although the second meal before you land wasn't very nice, the cabin crew were lovely and it landed on time. Getting out of the airport to the transfer area was easy, however the transfer company (Amstar) had lost our outbound booking, they had our return transfer but not the transfer to the Hotel! This resulted in a delay for 20 minutes till they sorted it out. As you can imagine, after a 10.5 hour flight and being up for nearly 24 hours, it was not what we wanted to be doing, waiting in the heat for it to be sorted. But credit where it's due they sorted it out and was attentive to ensure there were no hiccups for the return journey.||Check in|This was very good, as we were staying in the preferred section we were ushered to the check in area (our bags were left behind at the hotel entrance to be taken to our room) where it's also a drinks and snack place. So as there were a number of people there, we sat down, had a few snacks and a drink whilst waiting which was much needed. The concierge was very good with his attention and empathy, all done within 15 minutes and got to our rooms.||Rooms|We stayed here as a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 kids aged 16,14 and 11, our rooms were 121 and 123 as they were connected, we asked for a rollaway bed so all of the kids could sleep in one area which they sorted whilst we checked in. The rooms were large, the rollaway bed was very comfortable (according to my daughter!) and they had their own TV, bathroom and small fridge with soft drinks that were stocked up daily. This connecting room had two queen beds in it for the boys to sleep in.||When we got into our room (121) we noticed that the door wouldn't lock, and being on the ground floor, we didn't feel safe so we asked the preferred concierge if they could get someone to fix it which they did as a temporary measure, then fixed it properly a couple of days later. Our bathroom comes with his and her sinks and a walk in shower (no bath). Be careful as the water can tend to seep out so the floor of the bathroom was sometimes very slippery! We used to put one of towels down at the edge to stop the water coming out. The shower floor was also very slippery so used a shower mat. The shower itself is quite old and noticed that the other rooms has proper rain showers, this one didn't though.||Restaurants|There were a small number of restaurants we could choose from, but not everyday as 1 or 2 of them would be closed on certain days. So check the App to see which ones were open. A couple of evenings there was entertainment on the beach and outside bbq areas with seats/tables for the guests to sit at, with a drinks waiter always coming round, so a lovely couple of evenings eating/drinks and enjoying the shows.||Some restaurants were better than others.|1) El Patio (Mexican) - appetisers were delicious as was the Beef enchiladas however, due to a lack of description of what the dishes were, quite a bit of food was not eaten and we noticed that for most nights, this restaurant was hardly full. Please can a proper description of what the food is would be greatly appreciated!||2) Barefoot grill (fast food stuff) - This is on the beach part near World Cafe, not indoors so if you don't mind sitting in the shade whilst having a delicious hawaiian burger or hot dog or cooked to order pizza, then this is a good place to eat for a quick lunch.||3) World Cafe (buffet) - This is the main restaurant where you can go up and help yourself to all sorts of different foods for Breakfast, lunch and Dinner. ||4) Portofino (Italian) - Ate here on 3 separate occasions as the food was very good. Service sometimes was a bit rude I felt on one occasion, I wanted to try two different desserts and the waiter gave me a look of disgust, and not in a jokey way either! Apart from that, very good food.||5) Seaside Grill (Steakhouse) - Lovely food, a really good ribeye can be had here! Good selection of courses.||6) Gohan (Asian) - Sushi can be had but also other asian dishes (don't worry, you don't have to use the chopsticks if you don't want to!)||7) Oceana (Preferred Club - Seafood) - We ate here the most times. mostly breakfast and lunch. Very good food and you can have lots of choice that isn't just fish, the only thing is for dinner time, got eaten alive by the mossies as it's next to the river inlet.||TIPS|- Take inflatables with you from home, you don't want to be like muggins here and pay for a rubber ring that costs $25!|- If your kids want to use the two water slides, an adult needs to sign them in, once per day.|- Sargassum seaweed can be noticeable at times. The only time I really smelled it was when we drank at the bar next to the sea. But it is ok to swim in the lagoon area of the beach and kayak without encountering it.|- Tip your waiters/waitresses, you don't have to and us brits don't tend to tip much, but Jorge who was one of the waiters around the Preferred pool, was very good! He remembered which drinks the family had and brought them round during the day without even asking! A lovely touch which deserved to be tipped.|- No need to reserve a restaurant, so no need to wake up really early.||All in all, a lovely break away with the family, it was relaxing but also enough for the kids to do (always activities going on if your active!). If you don't expect 5* food, you'll have...

I guess part of this is my fault if I did not read enough reviews in advance so allow me to explain what I assumed in case you have done the same thing. I have been on about 6 trips to resorts in Cancun area from Excellence and El Dorado (both wonderful) to a couple of Riu's (nice) and a few others. All were very large properties that had long beaches and small animals running about on the grounds full of endless tropical plants.||We wanted to take our 5 year old grandson to play on a real beach. That was the thrust of the vacation. The picture of the resort showed a reef/stone circle that appeared to be an area where children could swim and play without the dangers of strong waves or sea creatures. It was owned by Hyatt under the names Dreams. We booked it and it was more of a nightmare.||I want to be clear that the housekeeping, service and restaurant staff were wonderful and we at least nice enough to apologize that we had come to a very unacceptable place. The folks above that in the "VIP" and management arena continued Hyatt's deception. ( would give these service folks 4 star rating)||We suspected something was amiss when we did not have a grand entrance to the resort. It was a faded sign on a wall to a gated community. Turns out this is a neighborhood with a marina and it happens to have a hotel and if you were to call it a "resort" it should have the words "postage stamp" in front of it.||As soon as the door of the vehicle was opened we were slammed with a horrible rotten egg smell. This permeated every corridor and room in the place. There apparently is a strong season this year of seaweed but most resorts have a long beach which allows the wind to dissipate the odor and they are able to clear it. This property has no beach -zero. It is only rocks but it does have that circular ocean pool that quickly fills up with seaweed and they can not successfully remove it as it is this pond and not a beach. It sits there and rots and decays into an incredibly horrible odor that just lingers there. This hotel in this compound is ideal for trapping the seaweed. It was so strong you needed a mask on the first day until you became more acclimated to the smell.||We had upgraded to the Honeymoon Suite assuming we would get a large luxury filled room. It was instead tiny with not even one chair to sit in other than the balcony (there were two out there). I drug one in so it could dry out from the rain so I had at least one chair to sit in. It was a honeymoon suite because it had a hot tub on the balcony but due to the stifling heat, humidity and odor of being trapped in the harbor it was unusable. the room would be more on the line of a 2 -3 star. One day we returned to the room with water all over the floor from the A/C leaking which was quickly fixed. I could tell from the crude cut out sheetrock hole in the ceiling that this must have been a regular occurrence.||The interior of the building was worn but the exterior you could tell had multiple repairs that were not put back together in a matching way (there was some of that in the interior where marble was removed but only plaster added back after it was fixed). The exterior seem to have a "duct tape repair" mentality. I would give the overall exterior 2 star and interior 3 star rating maybe.||My grandson was so disappointed in no beach and the pools were spotty on if they were clean or not. One kids pool never had one kid who would get not it. There were efforts to try to get them clean but it was not a great pool for kids. The VIP staff knew how upset and disappointed we were so they offered to send us to Dreams Tulum that had a beach so he could have at least one day to play on a beach. They said since we are in a Dreams Hotel we could use the facility and eat there as well. We took the offer and our grandson was very excited.||When we arrived we asked to go to the beach but they said we needed to check in first and sign a document. Turned out they were trying to con us into spending $25K to join their vacation club. We got there at 10 (it took 45 min between hotels) and we had not eaten breakfast. They said we had to listen to their pitch first before we could do anything. We were very upset and I said it would be noon before we could even have breakfast. We had not signed up for this and thought Hyatt was just trying to make up for the horrible situation at the other hotel. I was clear we were not interested and they said they had to do it but said they would just fill out a survey while we had breakfast and we could be on our way. 2 hours later we were still in a boiler room with a bunch of other people who had been snookered into this trick. After the fourth person would not take no for an answer I stood up and said Stop! I told my grandson we were not going to be allowed on the beach and I told the staff to order me a cab to leave. My grandson began crying so loud that it was beginning to affect the other sales efforts so they finally relented and let us go to the beach which we did for 3 hours then left. This deception leaves me overall at a 1 star or zero if permitted. This is not what one wants to be doing on a vacation. Never again will we stay in a...

We had our beach wedding at Dreams Aventuras on 5/14 this year. Our wedding day was perfect and beautiful in every way. Itzel, the wedding planner, was super flexible and helpful during our entire wedding planning. We couldn’t have done this without her help. On the other hand, my experience with Paulina, Groups Manager, was very stressful. In order to book rooms for the wedding group/guests, you have to go through Paulina. Paulina was friendly and nice but very slow to get you what you needed and often took a long time to get back to you. Paulina wasn’t great at communicating or keeping us in the loop. I had to keep following up with her which added more stress to my already-too-stressful wedding planning. We were able to book a minimum of 10 rooms which comes with special perks. I asked Paulina how we could enjoy these perks but we never got to enjoy any of them because Paulina never got back to me with more info. After my negative experience with her trying to book rooms, I decided that I would rather forget about the perks so there was 1 less thing for us to stress about. We purchased Ultimate Wedding Package and paid extra to upgrade our reception venue to El Patio, have cocktail hour at Barracuda, to have floral arch at the wedding ceremony and matching bridal bouquet, etc…and also paid extra to rent speakers and extend our reception dinner time by 3 hours so we had at least a few hours to dance. El Patio looked so beautiful inside especially at nighttime with the indoor lights and tree. We didn’t hire a DJ/MC to save money. One of my friends volunteered to be our DJ/MC and we played music from a Spotify list for dancing. We didn’t pay to have the dance floor. We just danced on the El Patio floor which worked out great. If you have budget for it, I’d totally recommend getting the illuminated dance floor. I’ve seen videos of it and it looked so fun and beautiful. Every dish and dessert at the reception dinner were all delicious. The wedding photos and video came out so beautiful. Since we got an all-inclusive wedding package, we honestly didn’t expect much but we were literally blown away by how everything turned out so perfect. The hotel staff all worked really hard and was so accommodating. Trust in them and be patient when things don’t go exactly the way you want right away. If we could go back to do things differently for our wedding, we’d still have our wedding at Dreams Aventuras and keep everything the same BUT I wish we paid extra to hire the wedding photographer and videographer to document our reception/dancing. Since we were on a budget, we decided to just have the photographer and videographer document our wedding celebration which was already included in our package. We had so much fun dancing the night away that I wish all those fun memories were captured by the professionals. Our amazing wedding guests took a lot of photos and videos of that night but it would have been very nice to have captured those moments by the professionals. Oh, and I also rented a bridal suite which I highly recommend. The bridal suite was very nice and it was so fun getting ready with my girls. The finger foods were delicious and they provide you with enough foods and drinks to fill you up. So don't make a mistake of eating before going to the bridal suite like I did haha. More info on the resort… The foods at all of the restaurant were good except for Gohan (the sushi didn’t seem fresh but non-sushi food items were good) and Mushroom Risotto at Portofino (it was way too salty). The buffet was one of our favorite places to eat. Sometimes, there would be a long wait at certain restaurants but we never had trouble finding a place to eat. The resort and rooms are beautiful and very family-friendly. I heard that the game room is super fun which I didn’t have a chance to check out. Everyone at the resort was very friendly and accommodating. The pools were also nice and never crowded. This was my very first time experiencing an all-inclusive resort and I already want to go back! I’d definitely be back for a...