Mexico is, on the evidence of booking patterns, the world’s most-booked girlfriend getaway destination. The reasons are structural rather than promotional: the flight from any North American city is short, the all-inclusive density on the Caribbean coast is the highest on the planet, the food and beverage programmes at the better properties have caught up…
Cancun is the world’s most visited all-inclusive destination and also the most misunderstood. The strip of hotels running down the Hotel Zone — that famous “7”-shaped barrier island between the Caribbean Sea and the Nichupté Lagoon — has so much variation inside it that choosing by brand name alone will reliably produce disappointed holidays. Two…
The Riviera Maya is what happens when a Caribbean coastline of genuine natural quality — the turquoise water, the white sand, the coral reef — is supplemented by a geological phenomenon that exists nowhere else in the Caribbean in this concentration: the cenotes. The Yucatan Peninsula’s limestone bedrock has been dissolved by groundwater over millennia…
Mexico’s all-inclusive market is the largest in the world. Cancun’s hotel zone alone contains more all-inclusive rooms than the entire Dominican Republic, and the Riviera Maya stretch from Playa del Carmen south to Tulum has developed in the past twenty years into the most concentrated luxury all-inclusive corridor on the planet. The consequence of this…
Cancun is the test case for what the all-inclusive resort can be when it is deployed at maximum scale in a destination that was created specifically to deploy it. The hotel zone — a thin sandbar between the Caribbean Sea and the Nichupte Lagoon, twenty-two kilometres long, connected to the mainland at either end —…
The arrival at Rosewood Mayakoba is conducted by electric boat through a network of mangrove canal waterways, and it takes approximately fifteen minutes from the reception pavilion to the casita. This is longer than the standard luxury hotel check-in process, and it is one of the most useful fifteen minutes in the Mexican Caribbean. The…
The Hyatt Ziva Cancun and the Hyatt Zilara Cancun sit on adjacent plots on the hotel zone’s northern section and share the same beach — which means the family booking the Ziva and the couple booking the Zilara are sleeping in different towers above the same stretch of Caribbean, and the World of Hyatt points…
Grand Velas Riviera Maya makes a claim that the all-inclusive format rarely attempts at a credible level: that the food within the resort’s boundaries is worth staying in for, not merely worth tolerating. The Frida restaurant — the property’s fine dining venue, named for Frida Kahlo, serving a tasting menu that has been recognised in…
Grand Velas Riviera Nayarit faces the Bay of Banderas from the Nuevo Vallarta resort corridor north of Puerto Vallarta, with the Sierra Madre mountains visible above the property’s jungle canopy and the Pacific beyond the bay’s open mouth visible on clear days from the upper suite terraces. It is the Pacific coast version of the…
The conversation about Mexico as a luxury all-inclusive destination has, for too long, been conducted almost entirely in reference to Cancún. This is understandable — the Hotel Zone has more resort rooms than some small nations have hotel beds, and the all-inclusive formula was deployed there at a scale and consistency that made it synonymous…