Dreams Natura Resort and Spa REVIEW - MASTER THREAD
Stayed 4 night at the Dreams Natura with my family of 4 (wife, 2 girls ages 11 and 15). Thought I would get a thread started on this property. We chose this property as the second half of our Cancun trip for a few reasons : the kids wanted an all inclusive, and this one had a lot of fun headlining activities including 3 water slides, lazy river, rock wall and a "roll glider" - zip line and roller coaster hybrid. This is despite some lukewarm reviews.
Pre arrival: We booked on points, and quickly found that you could get 2 rooms with 2 double beds each and 2 people in each room, for the same amount of points as 4 people in the same room. So we booked 2 rooms, with one adult and one child each.
I also attempted to use 2 SUA for the rooms, which in all honestly would have resulted in the most minimal of upgrade. But I already have enough SUA that I do not know how I will use before they expire. I went back and forth with Twitter Hyatt for weeks trying to get this accomplished... When they finally said it's not going to happen, here's 5000 points. Fine by me...
Then I got an email 3 days later saying the SUA had been applied. Still got the points.
The end of that story doesn't come until later, but at Check in they let me know no upgrades were available for me as a globalist. When I presented the email sating it was confirmed, they reiterated no upgrades available. To be fair, the app showed no bookable rooms at all for the 4 days I was there.
My wife followed the Dreams Natura Facebook group, and we started to get worried: reports of inconsistent A/C in both rooms and restaurants, headlining activities not keeping to schedule and being closed for whole stays, alligators on the beach.... But we felt better in the week leading up to the stay with people saying "lower your expectations and you'll be happy". That turns out to be...mostly true.
Check in: Driving up and getting out of the vehicle is very nice and luxurious feeling. A bellman takes your bags, and a piece of paper with very small type, but appeared to show name and room number, so he knows where to take the bags. First sign that upgrades were not in store.
Check in was mostly standard; They brought us some champagne, and the kids a fun blue drink. Front Desk agent asked if we were already Hyatt members? I let him know, I was, and Globalist (unusual for me). He went straight away into that while I am Globalist, they are sold out and no upgrades available. (As stated above, via the App, the place did seem sold out)
However, I (not quickly) was able to pull up confirmation email about using two SUA. I guess giving credence to his earlier statement, and after a call or two (because it was clear he had no idea what I was talking about) he reiterated no rooms available for upgrade. Since I didn't want to move rooms later (and our two rooms were close to one another) I accepted and moved on. Fortunately my (AWESOME, btw) Hyatt concierge credited them back AND extended them a year. All in all, fine by me.
Room was ready at 3pm when we checked in.
We did receive access to the preferred club for being Globalist, though this seemed to be given begrudgingly. We were also given an ok for a 2pm checkout by the FDA at checkin that...you guessed it...turned into a bit of a fiasco. We also were told about being able to use hydrotherapy circuit in Spa, which we didn't use.
We did have to be handed to the VIPservices timeshare person. My wife made rookie mistake ("We like to go to many different places") but she finally got the hint we were not interested.
Rooms:
We had two base rooms, doubles beds "tropical view" which honestly wasn't really that bad of a view. I expected a palm tree in a parking lot. Spacious with nice sized balconies for the base room, it was plenty serviceable. Very clean, and felt new (I believe this place is only a few years old). There were definitely some hard product problems. Each room has two deadbolt locks (a newer Hyatt standard and an older latch thingy). In each room, one of the two didn't work. One room was missing the hair dryer, and while I was so happy about a ceiling fan, it was noisy....and this coming from a guy who likes white noise to sleep. Lots of reports of keys not working, and we encountered one couple trying to leave the resort and catch their plane, whose keys no longer worked...with luggage inside. The employees finally had to balcony jump and break the glass door on the balcony to get into their room. (They scolded the guests for locking their balcony door???)
One room had a pungent cleaning smell upon check in, which we thought maybe was preceded by smoking in the room. However, on checkout day, while they cleaned another room, it become apparent this was normal cleaning smell that is both strong and spreads from room to room.
A/C was serviceable, got down to 72 degrees which was a relief.
Restaurants food and service
We ate breakfasts at the buffet, which I thought was good not great, family agreed. Should be noted, eating buffet on the last evening, the A/C was intermittent, making the buffet area (with all the heating elements, fires, etc.) unbelievably warm.
Dinners were:
Italian - quite good, liked the pizza and the bread with olive oil. Kids liked the pasta. Service was hit or miss....server warmed up but at first was rushed and seemingly perturbed. Portion sizes were on the small side.
Hibachi - inside the Japanese is the option for Hibachi grill and "show", but this must be reserved. Again, thought this was pretty good, obviously we've seen better Hibachi shows but a fun time was had by all.
Room service - kids really wanted the novelty of "free" room service. We ordered through the app, which does limit your ability to customize. Unfortunately, it was not at all good, much of it had been cooked and left to sit way way too long. I was looking forward to some french fries, and they seemed to have left the fryer 45+ minutes before being delivered. Salad was tiny with scant dressing and poorly mixed. Definitely disappointing. We again used app to let them know we were ready for trays to be picked up (a specific function in the app) and they never came that night. Had to try again the next day.
Public areas
"It was the best of times, it was the worse of times"
Overall, the public areas were very nicely appointed, and very very clean. There were several pools, including an adults only preferred pool. My wife mostly stayed there, and there was never overt trouble getting a chair at a decent hour (no 7am rush).
The exception were the public restrooms. My wife and young girls refused to re-use them after several attempts, as the smell and unkemptness was foul. For a baseline, we are all used to soccer field port-a-potty toilets every weekend, so this isn't comparing to golden toilets. By the end of our 4 day stay, they would all truck it up to the rooms to go to the bathroom.
Activities:
Really a huge relief here, everything was mostly as advertised. The rollglider, the water slides, the climbing wall, the lazy river, and the teens kid clubs were all fantastic. Some small hiccups here and there, with times not being strictly adhered to (and one missed rollglider session), and one slide of 3 always closed. But after hearing some bad reviews about slides, etc being closed for entirety of people's stay, I was relieved. The kids loved it.
Checkout: Anticipating problems, we went to confirm late 2pm checkout the day before departure. Naturally, front desk agent not only didn't see it noted, acted like this just wasn't possible. We pushed, and he relented, but needed all our keys to re-key. Ok, fine, we'll be back in a few.
Come back....it is now a third front desk agent, and here we go again. He finally relented as well, but when he re-keyed the keys, they did not get a "preferred club sticker", because as he said, we were not in a preferred club room. ("Yes sir, that is correct, but it comes from being Globalist." Blank stare.). I am not sure if the sticker matters, it probably has more to do with how it is keyed...but we gave up on this point. We had someone from our family stay in the room until 2pm as not to get locked out.
Overall, we picked this place based on the outdoor activities for the kids (rollglider, rock wall, lazy river, 3 slides) despite lower review scores than other considerations. On this point, it was a success. It should be noted, mom and dad were on a weight loss drug, so unlimited wasn't an appealing or valuable concept to us.
Kids score: 4.5/5
Parents score 3.5/5