Which hotel?

Conrad Tulum. I always salivate over 4th night free at higher end properties but looks like math says use certifs.

Since the reward nights expire at some point and the points do not I'd use the certificates first and then pay the balance in points.

A Hilton redemption in the range of 1 cpp is a great use.

Also, don't forget the savings on taxes, which are really high in Mexico.

360,000 points for a 5 night stay, or 72,000 points per night. Each night is worth about $600 so you would be getting about 0.83 cents per point.

That's worth spending your points for. For me, anything above 0.5 cents per night is worth spending points for, based on how I have found Hilton's variable-pricing algorithm works. Best use of Hilton points from what I have found are when there is a standard room available for a very high cash rate. I would start with the free night certificates and then burn the points, unless you plan on staying at a hotel that is even more expensive where you can burn the free night certificates.

3 certifs and 180k points DONE and booked!!! April stay. Will report back on the property and Diamond benefits.

What’s the F&B options and costs like here? I’m assuming breakfast is inc. as Diamond without upsell?

Just returned from the Conrad Tulum for our honeymoon. Spent 360k HH points for 5 nights, at 90k per night with the 5th night free. Booked a base “Tropical View” room and was upgraded to a “Partial Ocean View” room as a Diamond member.

The hotel was at about 20% capacity (according to the concierge), so I was pretty disappointed to not get a suite. Seems like it was a corporately mandated policy to only allow one room-type upgrade for Diamond members. However, the rooms are spacious and beautiful, and we really enjoyed the partial ocean view room.

The free breakfast for Diamonds here was actually free (no additional fees for the buffet or for specialty coffees). The breakfast was undoubtedly one of the highlights of our stay. It rivaled the best hotel breakfast buffets that I’ve ever eaten at… three rooms full of pastries, juices, an omelet bar, smoked salmon, chilaquiles, fresh smoothies, and basically every fruit I’ve ever seen.

There were three restaurants on site (the 4th one is still under construction). Prices were high, but what you might expect for a high-end hotel in a resort setting. My wife and I ended up spending $75-$100 per person per dinner. For the record, the food was incredible. Aside from an average experience one night at their pool side bar, we didn’t have a bad dish during our entire trip (which included lunch at their casual restaurants).

There is a sneaky 10% “service fee” that Hilton adds on to every bill. I asked multiple waiters what the fee was for and they said that it was for all of the staff around the hotel, but it was not their tip.

The service was impeccable. Not sure if it was because I was a Diamond member, or because it was our honeymoon, or because the hotel was a ghost town, but we were given the royal treatment. We were given something extra at every lunch/dinner (champagne, an appetizer or dessert), and we had the concierge checking in on us at least twice per day.

Funny enough, the only time we noticed a decline in the service was our last day, when a group of Hilton execs arrived on the property. Basically, every staff member in the resort dropped everything to make sure they had a great experience. We had a waiter tell us after a 45 minute wait for a beer and some guacamole that the chef deprioritized our order in order to serve the Hilton table faster. Pretty disappointing, but I can’t blame the staff for trying to impress their bosses…

Overall, I can’t recommend the Conrad highly enough and it’s not a bad way to redeem HH points given a room rate of ~$750 per night with taxes/fees. Looks like Hilton is “discounting” the points rate from 95k to 90k per night as they try to fill up the place for the first few months after opening.

If the hotel is at 20% occupancy, then Hilton Honors will reimburse so little to the hotel owners that any award price would still be minting $$$ for Hilton corporate. Certainly a better bet than hoping that people will pay $750 per night in Tulum.

But perhaps the award pricing algorithm can't deal well with occupancy projections for new hotels.

What is the cuisine of the restaurants that were open, and was all the food of high quality? They don't seem to have menus posted anywhere online so it is a bit hard to gauge variety. Also, how was the quality of the beach regarding sand, ocean (were rocks or seaweed an issue)? You mentioned one of the restaurants was still under construction, are there a lot of signs of lingering construction around? Thanks!

The three restaurants that were open were Maratea (mediterranean), Ukai (sushi), and Autor (fine dining Mexican restaurant). The food was truly spectacular. Autor was our favorite. We did their 6 course tasting menu at $80 per person, and every dish was awesome. The Asian fusion (Kengai) is still under construction. From the looks of it, it's probably a few weeks away from opening.

I tried posting the link to the hotel info, but FT won't let me post links since I'm new to the site. Try to type in the URL like this and if not, I can send another way: "conradtulum." + "sabio." + "host"

The resort is located on a small cove (look at Google Maps for perspective). The beach is relatively small, but had nice white sand and is not rocky. They had two guys raking up the beach every morning, so there was minimal seaweed. The nice thing about being in this cove is that it's a very calm beach. No big waves even when it was windy. We brought goggles and were able to do some snorkeling. There are a few rocky parts where we saw fish, some coral, even a stingray. Nothing like real snorkeling, but cool for being right off of the beach.

The Conrad did a pretty good job of hiding the construction. They only have 4 of their 8 "casas" open right now (buildings where guests stay), but they make sure that the ones under construction where the ones furthest away from the main resort area. A couple of nights, we could see the flood lights from construction on the other side of the resort, but we had no issues with noise. The main resort area is basically entirely finished with the exception of that last restaurant and the kids club area.

Many thanks for your review djo4gq - I've had this property on my short list for a trip in June. I am having trouble finding the menus, if you want to PM me the links I'm happy to post them for the benefit of all of us.

Thanks! This worked like a charm. Here it is for quick reference for others - https://conradtulum.sabio.host/#/ .

One last thing, it doesn't look like they have any beer or cocktails on their menus. Are they not listed?

Thanks Michael19887! You're right, they didn't share any alcohol menus except for the wine list. The last night, they had a cocktail list without prices at the Mediterranean restaurant, but other than that, they would list the available drinks from memory.

Beers were $7 - $12, cocktails were $10 - $15. Once the waiter upgraded our liquor without asking and our drinks were $22 each. My theory is that they purposely don't list the drink prices because people would see how expensive everything is. The waiters never responded with "we don't have a drink list yet." They would always start listing everything they had. Quite annoying, but that's what I was prepared for when I decided to not go to an all-inclusive resort.

Any news on stuffed animal or rubber ducky?