Margaritaville Vacation Club - Rio Mar — Hotel in Río Grande

This is a very nice place to stay in Puerto Rico. Beautiful architecture and landscaping, updated rooms, friendly staff, several pools and restaurants, walk straight onto the beach. Several free activities like mixed drink tastings. Pool side drinks are amazing, and affordable with refillable cup deal. Poolside restaurant is great. The restaurants inside are very pricey, but what little we had was good. Margarita maker in the room was a nice touch. Free laundry was nice. If you are particular about the view from your room call and ask, as our "pool view" was a sideways view of the courtyard and luckily a decent, though angled, view of the ocean (Sunrises!). As always, beware the Timeshare people; very friendly vultures. July 2019 trip.

I'm going to write a fairly lengthy review of what we did while staying at this resort. Personally, I had to piece together tons of sources to plan my vacation, and reviews of the resort made it hard to know what to expect when staying here.

We wanted to experience as much of Puerto Rico as we could, and this resort actually is very well located for that. Definitely rent a car if you want to experience any culture, because you have to leave the resort for that and drive quite a bit. Just to get there from San Juan is more than a 30 minute drive! Car rental from airport is fairly cheap. Resort charged $15 per day for parking. Totally worth it, just on money saved by not eating at resort. Otherwise, shuttle to resort is offered, and Ubers will apparently service the resort if you only want to leave rarely. There is an Enterprise desk in the resort for daily rentals, but limited hours and pricey.

I watched several YouTube travel videos and looked up several travel guides to find the best places to visit. Totally worth the time and effort to plan it out as we got to see a ton of stuff we otherwise wouldn't have.

Definitely spend a day or two walking around Old San Juan (highly recommend Punto de Vista rooftop restaurant at dusk for Mofongo) and Bacardi factory. So much food, history, shopping, and photo ops. Don't miss the Senor Paleta ice cream popsicles (this needs to become a food trend stateside)!

The resort is practically across the street from El Yunque rainforest which requires 1 to 2 days to enjoy fully. It's a long drive up and back down with stops along the way to climb hiking trails to beautiful outlooks, and waterfalls you can climb on and swim in! Go right when it opens as parking is limited for hiking, it all gets crowded, it will be cooler, and morning sun is more beautiful. Also, the little town between the resort and rainforest has amazing little restaurants (Lluvia for breakfast) and gift shops.

East down the main road a little ways is a public beach called Luquillo. The beach itself is actually better for swimming than at the resort, but more important is the food! There is this long strip of probably 40 restaurants called the kiosks that have the best local and international food!

About a half hour drive East of the resort is one of the 3 Bioluminescent Bays on the island. This is one of only a few places on Earth where you can see water glow at night as you paddle through it in Kiaks (thanks to Bioluminescent algae). We happened to end up with a private tour, for $80 I think, with a very entertaining guide who took us out on the water for several hours. Unfortunately the water doesn't always glow very strongly, so depending on when you are there it may not be worth doing. There are charts online that predict the glow level. It's a once in a lifetime experience for most though.

Puerto Rico was full of both difference and sameness for me as a young middle class, Midwestern American. Driving around, things look rough and rundown, but yet there are also still many upscale malls and Walmarts nearby. If you pull off the road at a questionable looking restaurant or store, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised by a clean and tidy business with excellent food or wares. You just need to be open minded and give things a chance. And check...

Second year coming here. First with my wife then second with my parents and in-laws. Tranportation: if you need more than one car such as a group of 7+ people a large taxi will work and cost around 100$ otherwise use Uber as it's the cheapest costing around 55$ to get to the resort from the airport. Car rentals are very expensive ranging from 150-200$ a day. The resort also charges a 20$ parking fee.

Resort: very beautiful landscape and the walk on beach. The waves tend to be angry but also fun when they push you around. Not as child friendly and they're is no shallow end with no waves. Beach stretched very far and great for walking. Theres gold at 250$ a round. Spa with massages for almost the same price. Various restaurants. Laundry and wifi are free. The lounge chairs and umbrellas.on the beach are free and staff will set them up. There are hot tubs, pools, billiard. There is no walkway to the main road where they have restaurants and the convenience store so you need a vehicle. It is possible to walk to the beach and the restaurant strip to the right of the resort along the beach.

Rooms: pretty good for the most part. The beds are very comfy. The kitchenette is very functional. The one bedroom even offeres an oven. We had to make some calls regarding the balcony door handle falling off, burnt out light bulbs etc but nothing major.

Food: the food on the resort is very good however if you are thinking of getting breakfast, snqck and dinner plus alcohol you are looking at 60-100$ per days easily per person. We rented a van for the day and drove to Costco. I got enough food and booze to last me a whole week for 180$. For two people. We ate out once and a big family dinner. Really wanted to check out Palio again but they changed their menu where it's no longer a la carte but a 3 course fixed dinner starting at 70$ per person.

Excursions: really fun if you can afford it. Usually 140-200$ per person for a few hours. On our first trip here we did the rain forest. Catamaran adventure to one of the islands.

The presentation: this is the sales pitch Wyndham offeres all the visitors with a 100$ room credit in return. They don't seem to offer fractured or step style offered anymore. They just give you a tour as ask for 50k plus usd for the bronze membership. I've been a member for years almost at bronze. The only offer they could give me was a package worth 82k usd which was laughable. I would not be able to use that many points yearly. Needless to say no one bought anything. I guess they switched their focus from middle class to rich people.

Billing: everything on the resort is bought through your room number which is attached to your credit card. Sounds very convenient never having to carry your money around. However my in-laws had their bill doubled at the restaurant we went to was thankfully easily corrected. We were told there's a new system which was "glitchy". My parents had two additional charges costing 200$ which they didn't make. The resort said they will have to "investigate" before making any charges. That's concerning cause either someone can just say your room number and eat at your expense or it's another glitch where it was charged to...

We were very excited for this vacation; truthfully as a business owner finding the time for lengthy vacations can be more difficult. My stay is from 08/08/2025 - 08/18/2025, I’m literally writing this review while I’m here as the stay has become more and more interesting each day.

We were booked for roughly 6 months. Especially excited for the amenities that the hotel has to offer it was extremely unfortunate to receive a text the day before our arrival that the hotel was closing the casino through November 4th. Marbella was completely relocated, and full on construction was going on from August 4th until December 15th! We’re in room 5133 and the hotel had construction starting between 5:30-6am every morning although the hotel specifies that quite hours are from 7am-11pm. That quite time is completely ignored by hotel staff, I called them at 6:30 one morning to request they stop the noise and allow me one decent night of sleep over my vacation stay but absolutely nothing changed.

We are Wyndham members and have never had such a bad hotel stay in our lives. I do not recommend coming here to anyone whether you be a young couple or family of 5. Stay far far away from this resort.

A few other red flags. We observed glass bottles at the “5’ o’clock somewhere” pool multiple times. Siting at the bar also smelt like years old grease, I could barely eat my food without gagging on the smell of dirty kitchen grease. We arrived to the hotel and thought valet would be great. The second day nobody could find my vehicle, thank god I left a hoodie in there from travels because it was the only item that allowed me to prove that it was in fact my rental when the staff was reluctant to give me the keys to my rental. From that day forward I used the self park service. DO NOT VALET. To add to the ridiculous valet experience the hotel allows checking at 4pm. I carefully scheduled my travels time and showed up to the hotel at 3:45pm just 15 minutes before checkin. Mind you, the hotel was texting me prior to my arrival asking when we would be arriving and I game them a 30 minute window of 3:30-4:00pm. At this point it’s to no surprise that a room was not ready and they threw some wrist bands at us, took our luggage, and told us to go hangout because they were in the final stages of having the room ready. Now after an hour went by and we were pretty sweaty from the lack of clothes to change into we finally had a room, but no bags! Our bags arrived about another hour later after I texted hotel guest services a couple times as I was very eager to get this vacation off to a better start.

Thankfully there were nearby attractions like the Carabalí rainforest, old San Juan, lots of good food, and nightlife.

Overall zero stars, location isn’t much here considering everywhere you go is an island/beach. Book elsewhere for your family, you will highly regret Margaritaville unless they undergo some serious change. I may edit this review if the hotel gets it together...