I’m not telling you where we stayed…

Before you start rolling your eyes hear me out. Of course I am going to share the best hotel finds. However, I am not going to tell you where I stayed if the hotel doesn’t meet the standards I have created for the brand and myself. This is why, I am simply not going to tell you where we stayed in Punta Cana this past week.

While I was creating this brand, I knew that I wanted to really showcase how I personally travel. I consider myself a “boujie” traveler that hates coming back home to see my entire bank account drained. This is where I thought of the concept of providing affordable luxury travel. But I knew that everyone had a different perspective as to what luxury is. And while I’ll dedicate an entire blog breaking down what I consider luxury, for now I will tell you what is not. I’ll do this by listing the things that this hotel just missed the mark in.

1. Customer Service

   As I mentioned, I will go more in depth in another blog about what I consider luxury and there I will go in a complete rant. However, I need to mentioned this here because this is pretty much what stained the beginning of our vacation. For those who don’t know, I worked in customer service for 6 years and I like to think that I was pretty great at it. This is why I am so picky about it anywhere I go. To start of, the hotel had us waiting over 2 hours for our room. But this isn’t necessarily the worst part. The way that the employees were treating the guests around us was a MAJOR red flag. The manager of the hotel was actively ignoring guests that have been staying there for 2-3 nights prior that have had problems and never resolved. What were these problems? Well… pretty big ones.

   • The most common one was guests being given the wrong rooms. The resort was divided into two sections: the Premium side and the standard side. People who paid for the Premium side and room were given standard rooms that were half the price they paid for when they checked in. They never bothered to change the rooms even after 2 days of constant pressure from the guests.

   • People where being given rooms that were already occupied. Yes… that is correct. Imagine getting back to your room after a day at the pool to find other people in your room. And in some cases, the original guest with the room got their belongings removed to accommodate the new guests. I could not make this stuff up even if I wanted to. The guests will then go to the lobby to let them know that someone removed their personal belongings from their room to accommodate other guests just to have the employees, specifically the manager, COMPLETELY disregard and ignore them. Talk about a red flag. I mean when we did eventually get our room, we decided to write in a big piece of paper “THIS ROOM IS TAKEN. DO NOT TOUCH ANY PERSONAL BELONGINGS.” and lay it on the bed. No one should ever have to do that.

   • When checking in, no one told us any details of our stay. Whether we had to make reservations for the restaurants, what kind of activities the resort was doing, COVID-19 test information, and more. This made us lose out on a night of dinner reservations and when we asked for this information, we were given major attitude that simply left a bad taste.

   • Employees bad mouthing the guests had me flabbergasted. I simply don’t understand why any employee would talk bad or cuss at a guest simply because they think they don’t understand them. One employee caught a man putting a plastic cup into recycling bin and out of no where snatched the cup out of his hand and said she could “smack him” because of how stupid they were. Once again, I could not make this up even if I wanted to.

2. Out-dated Resort

   Obviously, there is nothing wrong with an outdated resort. However, when there is something else being marketed on social media, I have a problem with it. I’m sure that the bad customer service blurred a lot during this trip and made me even more anal about things but I still stand by the fact that in some places, it just felt like a motel disguised as a resort. And keeping in mind that the resort was divided into two sections, the standard section felt a lot more “luxurious” than the Premium section. The pools were dirty, the rooms were outdated, as well as some of the other amenities.

The resort was all-inclusive and essentially $85 a night per person which makes it extremely affordable. And although these might not be a deal breaker for some of you, for me and my brand these are major ones. The first day in the resort we ended up even looking at other hotels around us to see if we could simply leave. We and others were treated so badly that simply did not make it worth it to stay. Due to the fact the everything was completely out of our budget, we decided to stay.

I am sure we will have more experiences like these since it is the risk when trying to find affordable luxury. However, not everything needs to be “you get what you paid for.” Luxury isn’t monetary, it’s an experience. Customer service is an experience and it is free. This resort simply just didn’t meet our luxury standard.

And I lied. To avoid you staying here, the name of the resort is Impressive Punta Cana.