Originally Posted by
csdripps
+1. I went to Costa Rica in March 2012 for a friend's wedding and the pacific coast is great. I had a big enough group that we were able to book a pretty sweet beach house with 9 bedrooms that we found on VRBO. If you don't mind being off of a resort, there are a lot of reasonably priced places that you can find on VRBO in small villages where the locals are really friendly. We stayed in Esterillos Oeste and had the entire beach almost to ourselves and there were several restaurants and a small grocery mart that had all the necessities we needed.
I flew into LIR to get to Costa Rica, had better award availability. The drive was longer but it was an easy route with no traffic.
Thanks for the advice. I did look at a few options outside of the Hilton Papagayo resort after reading reviews that mentioned it could get rowdy with kids, and found some nice rentals around Tamarindo. I was also able to fly there and back in F around 100k miles (DL site did it for 80k until I went from 1 ticket to 2).