Riu Palace Punta Cana - All Inclusive

Punta Cana is a beautiful destination! The sunshine, the blue water, and the softest sand are all amazing! The Hotel Riu Palace was fantastic, for the most part. The staff were very friendly and helpful. Huge shout out to Espinal at the pool bar. He did an outstanding job making sure we were happy and that our drinks were full at all times! Another shout out to Lamares at the La Isabela buffet. We had a group of 8, and he made sure that we were all seated together at the best tables. We ate at 3 of the a la carte restaurants, and they were very good. Unfortunately, there are a few complaints as well. One of our rooms did not have working air conditioning, and it took 3 maintenance visits before a new room was offered. The new room was a handicap room, so it was not ideal, but it worked. On our last night, alarms in the rooms started going off at 1:30am and lasted a good hour or so. After they had stopped for a while, an announcement came over the speakers for us to evacuate the building, so we all headed down to the lobby. There were many upset guests in the lobby, and it was not a good experience. After about an hour, we went back to our rooms, just to be woken up again by the alarms at 7am. Not a good way to end a fantastic vacation. Unfortunately, we will not be returning to this hotel.

I spent the last week at RIU Palace (a truly ironic name) Punta Cana. My girlfriend’s family and I don’t get much time away from work and were really looking forward to a peaceful week away but we all feel like we completely wasted the thousands of dollars we spent at this resort. THE ROOMS: Where to begin. The rooms at the RIU Palace all had a distinct musty odor, like your grandmother’s old shoe closet. A few of the restaurants smelled the same way (see food review below). To make matters worse, my girlfriend and I were locked out of our rooms for FIVE HOURS on Sunday evening (see attached photos). We went to the lobby three separate times to have someone unlock our door. Each time the person at the counter said he would send someone from the maintenance team to unlock our room, and each time no one came. We felt stupid wasting so much of our trip sitting on the ground in front of our rooms like ******. We probably logged 5000 steps pacing back and forth to and from the lobby that evening alone. The accommodations in the room were downright horrendous. There were tiny bugs on the bedsheets, the rooms were FREEZING (you couldn’t control the temperature, just AC on and AC off), and the resort only offered paper thin sheets to keep warm. There were no comforters but you could request a coarse brown blanket (it took me 4 separate calls to reception to receive said blanket). In addition, during our visit, the fire alarm went off two separate times in the middle lf the night on the evening of Saturday 3/8 and the entire building needed to be evacuated. We have no idea why. We had a newborn baby with us whose sleep was disturbed by this unexplained issue. What’s more, no one at the resort offered an explanation or apology for this, which is unacceptable. THE FOOD: As bad as the rooms were, the food was worse. Much worse. I guess before I can even describe the quality of the food, which was terrible, I need to share the countless health code violations (if such a thing exists in the DR) my group observed. The food - burgers and hot dogs, meat products- in the sports bar was kept out at room temperature for AT LEAST 12 hours. There was no meat thermometer and no one monitoring the food safety; the sports bar had one bartender in the room most of the time and that’s it. The hot dogs buns were covered in black mold (see attached photo). We found hair and bugs on our plates on at least two instances. The plates and cups were poorly cleaned, and we saw several people vomiting in the bathroom from the food (we *only* got sick from the alcohol - see more below). Now onto the food quality. Almost all of the food at the resort was inedible. Full stop. The breakfast and lunch buffet featured stale bread, soggy fries, nacho chips that tasted like paper, supposedly cold cheeses and cured meats that were lukewarm, burgers that tasted like hockey pucks, and hot dogs that had a strange texture and a chemical aftertaste. There were trays and trays of