Playa Esmeralda

The resort is nice, the staff is friendly, with a suite you get a butler and ours, Eric, really did a great job. There are 4 a la carte restaurants for dinner so if you stay a week it can get a little redundant. The food was good, but not great (in comparison to other resorts in that category and price range we have been to before). All in all it was a nice vacation but I feel we paid a lot or rather too much considering what we got (compared to other resort vacations that we did before). What did bother us is that there is a major construction side right next door (10-15 feet from the „fence“), there is another resort being built and our room was the second room right next to it, it was not possible to change rooms within the same category (only to rooms without the private pool), so we had to stay in that room. My advice would be to request a room on the left side (buildings 2 / 4 / 6) since that is furthest from the construction. If you get a swim up room, get one with pool view, not garden view because if you’re on the right side (building 3 or 5) that will give you construction view (there’s no garden). Regarding Expedia and the resort credit: that is basically a scam. We got $500 in resort credit. What we only learned upon arrival is that only $100 can be used per day and you have to book something that costs more than 100 so basically they make you pay more money to use the resort credit. This was stated nowhere in the booking = very intransparent hidden costs.