Just back from Rocky Point - Mayan Palace Puerto Penasco
We just spent 6 days at the Mayan Palace Puerto Penasco. We originally planned to arrive on Saturday, but a sporting event for our friends kids, required arriving on Sunday. On Friday, I called the MP to let them know that we would be arriving on Sunday, but wanted them know that we would be there and wanted to have our 2 – 2 bedroom units still available. The person who answered assured me that our units would be the same. Well, when we arrived on Sunday, I went inside to check in while the others worked with the Bell Staff. The gal at the desk looked at our reservations, then left to go to the back office. I waited a while and the rest of our group came in about the same time that the gal and her manager. He said that they had overbooked for this week (fall break for Phoenix schools) and they did not have 2 2-bedroom units available!
He asked if we would take one 2-bedroom and a 1-bedroom with an extra $300 credit. I said yes, since we had our grandson with us and our friends have 3 kids. Hubby and grandson were not pleased, so hubby asked for free WIFI for the room we were assigned. The manager did agree to that. At least we had 2 units in the newest building and have ocean views in both units.
On Monday, we found out that the other family that was supposed to come with us but could not get away on Saturday or Sunday would arrive Wednesday!!! Panic City!!!!
We went to the front desk on Monday and Tuesday with no luck, but Wednesday AM, when hubby said we were going to have to leave so that our other friends could have a place to stay, they told us that some people had checked out and we could move up to the 7th floor in a 2-bedroom unit. They said we would not get the extra $300 room credit
but did keep the free WIFI. We were semi OK with that. We spent most of Wednesday waiting for the room and moving. (I really think they should have given us about $150 in credit because we would be in the new unit from Wednesday afternoon until the Saturday morning check-out, so less than 3 days of our week.) But, we were happy enough since we got a nice 2-bedroom unit on the 7th floor. We are going to have 13 people – 6 adults with 7 kids (5 are teens). We just needed space and bathrooms!!!
Our friends took the tour. They were told that 20 Grand “somethings” would be completed before January. They agreed that that is not going to happen. Since they called it Grand something, you know they did not buy! They did buy the exit package that gave them several weeks here as a trial. They were impressed with the model unit they saw that had the dipping pool – that is why they bought the trial package. (It was a Grand Mayan.)
Thursday morning, my husband said that someone caught him Wednesday and asked him to take the 15 minute owner update – no breakfast, just info on what is going on. Well, this took more than an hour and that was basically because we finally told them we were not really interested and needed to get back to our family and friends. We told them more than once that we were happy with what we have.
They said they just wanted to save us money. With the new program, we would not pay renovation fees every 5 years or maintenance fees. In 10 years we would lose some weeks and pay 2 MF for 4 weeks to renew the contract for 10 more years. This was only going to cost us $40,000. Just to do our 2 Grand Mayan units would have been $10,000. They were really concerned as to why we had 5 contracts. We did not explain to them how we had that many contracts – they should be able to figure that out. We do not pay $4000 per year in MF and Reno Fees now – even if we go to all of them, so we did not see a reason to pay more $ upfront. We already have Senior Certificates & No Pay Unless We Go on 5 of 6 units and Profile A on our 2 Grand Mayan units. We did not give them the time go into all the details since we did not feel that they had anything that we wanted to buy at this time.
We were shown copies of all our contracts that had all our specifics on them – “Equity”, Golf, Senior Certificates, No Mandatory MF, VF weeks, etc. We asked to have those and were told they would make copies and send them up in a little while. We did not get them on Thursday as promised. We called on Friday and asked for copies of all out contracts so that we had “clean” copies, not just the carbon ones that are getting fairly old. We also asked for copies of papers the sales people had. We never got them.
The only resort update was that the guy said that the new buildings and a new pool would be completed in November 2013. The pool will be in the area where they took the one out. The larger building next to the current tower would be a Grand Mayan and the smaller one closet to the Sales Office would be a Grand Bliss. We asked about the Grand Bliss top floor that is really tall, about 20 feet – we wondered if this was going to be a restaurant or something special. He said those would be “special” units. He did not say what these would be or what they would be called. Interestingly enough, they had Grand Mayan and Grand Luxxe models near the Sales Office, but no Grand Bliss Model.
Oh, BTW – Our friends were offered breakfast for the family, golf for $50, ½ price Spa Treatments, $50 room credit for WIFI, discounts on Eco-Fun activities and 10% off everything they charged to their room. We got nothing! They said we would get 10% off our room charges, but it did not show up. We had to remind them about the 950 Peso credit for WIFI. But, we had only charged 163 Pesos to our room and they do not give credits for the Room Tax, so we only missed out on $1.40 USD! We could have gone to breakfast, but that would have taken a much longer update. I do not think we would have made it through a 2-hour update without walking out!
The last time we were here was October 2008. Since we were here, they have not done very much – there are no new units. They have removed the “pool” that was under construction in 2007 and 2008. They do have a new entrance with a concrete road, but it just takes you to the sand road that we used to drive on. They are building some new Palapas on the beach.
WIFI is no longer free in the lobby, but is available in your unit for 950 Pesos – about $85 at the resort rate of 11 Pesos to the $. The big problem is that it is VERY slow. Too slow to make a Skype call or to upload large picture files to send to friends, download large files, videos, games, etc. (We were able to do all of that when it was free in the lobby.) Actually, just to load websites you often have to refresh once or twice before you get it to open. You can only use it on one device per room, so we all had to use the same computer. This was not a huge problem, but our grandson was disappointed because he brought his iPad and we chose to use my laptop for WIFI.
There are many new activities here. Our grandson and his friends enjoyed the trampolines and climbing wall, these were not free, as they are run by a vendor. There are also wave runners, kayaks in the Estuary, Bird Island tours and a couple of other activities are new since we were last here. The company that runs it is ECOFUN. The kids all loved playing soccer on the beach one evening. It is beginning to look more like a Mayan Palace.
Our friends all loved the place. We had a great time, but were disappointed that we did not get what we had planned to have. Since we own a total of 6 Grupo Mayan weeks, we were quite unhappy about our check-in experience. Now when we go to the MP in PV this November and to the Grand Bliss in June, 2013, we can honestly tell them that we have done the update and are not interested. It will be some time before we do that again.
Check out the photos on the link below.
