Punta Mita, MX - Susurros del Corazón - new Auberge?
May 26, 2023, 2:02 pm
#16
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 323
Ok, here's my review:
- The hard product is fabulous:
- The architecture is quite stunning, and the resort feels to me like "just the right size". I love that you don't need a buggy to get around, and the way every room is arranged around the pools looking down to the ocean works well
- We had an Oceanview Casita, which was just the right amount of space for two of us. The room is really beautifully designed all the way down to the details. The outdoor furniture is super comfortable (where do I get me some of this for home?!) and the view from our balcony is stunning
- The beach itself is fantastic - beautiful white sand. I think I read somewhere this is the only hotel with a truly private beach in Punta de Mita? The beach is indeed truly private, and if you walk about half way along it, you can set up camp with some towels in just incredible privacy. There's obviously no guys selling trinkets. Removing the seaweed from the beach seems to be a full-time - and honestly somewhat Sisyphean - job for the guy driving the tractor. But if you walk half way up the beach to the really private part a bit away from the hotel, there's no seaweed at all
- The three pools are great, and the pool bar in the adults pool (of the three, the one that's furthest from the ocean) is a whole vibe. We loved hanging out in the casitas behind the pool and jumping in out of the pool when we got hot
- Some rooms have a huge circle cut out in the balcony between the two rooms, which I guess was a worthy but still extremely questionable architectural pursuit with the sad side effect of completely taking away guests' privacy on their balcony (I would not choose one of these rooms)
- The vibe product is good
- The hotel has a relaxed, upbeat energy to it that I liked
- The staff were quick to joke around, and genuinely funny
- I think occupancy was about 50%, which meant we still had a lot of privacy but the resort didn't feel like a ghosttown (we were once the only guests at Amanbagh, which we did not like)
- The music playing at the pool bar which you can hear from most of the resort was a bit W for me, but I see why they do it
- The soft product needs a lot of work:
- The "Welcome home!" greeting on arrival has just incredible White Lotus energy (not an original observation), and I can't believe they haven't changed it
- It took maybe 8 hours and several phone calls to get connected with our butler when we arrived, which was honestly quite annoying as we'd forgotten a few basic things and wanted to get them delivered to our room
- The hats in the boutique are $280 USD (bring your own hat!)
- My biggest gripe was the fact that the maintenance guys were doing extensive work on the deck below the top pool
- We swam up to the infinity edge of the top pool - the only place in the shade - and discovered that the strange, loud noise was a guy with an electric sander. Obviously with the sea breeze this was blowing wood dust straight up all over the pool bar, all over our sunglasses, and into the top infinity pool
- I have to confess that I completely lost my patience at this situation. If I were the GM of a luxury hotel, my first inclination would have been to fire every employee within 100ft, on the spot, for not stopping this before it happened. The pool bar manager offered is a gazebo or whatever those things are called, which I interpreted as asking us to move away from the maintenance, which only caused me to lose my .... even more.
- Anyway, they stopped the maintenance (or at least the electric sanding) until we left, but this left a pretty sour taste in my mouth
- The housekeeping is also incredibly slow. I'm not expecting Aman style "the room is quitely and quickly serviced while you're at breakfast", but to get back from a late breakfast and a long walk on the beach at 12pm and still have one housekeeper with half an hour more work to do is quite disruptive
- The staff are the restaraunts and bars are way, way too quick to ask for your room number (and your name?!), which has real Marriott energy unbefitting such a great property. Sometimes they askl even before you sit down. Do they have some problem at this fairly remote resort with non-guests sneaking in and charging things to other people's rooms? We were there for four nights and went to basically the same restaurant twice a day, and were asked over and over again. Why not just give you a bill at the end and you can write your room number on it?
May 26, 2023, 2:13 pm
#17
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 323
Oh, one more detail that really pissed me off. We booked through Amex FHR, which claimed to include breakfast but turned out to only include only a $35 usd per person breakfast credit. The breakfast is expensive (I think a bottle of water is like $10usd?) and so we ended up spending well over $100 every day on breakfast. In the big scheme of things, whatever extra we paid here made absolutely no difference to us, but it felt incredibly cheap to me on the hotel's part.
May 26, 2023, 3:01 pm
#21
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 323
I guess like Latin pop/RnB in the afternoons, which I quite liked, mixed with more traditional Latin American music at other times of the day. (I didn't pay that much attention, although I thought they were running the same playlist every day)
Jun 1, 2023, 12:40 pm
#22
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 405
Oh, one more detail that really pissed me off. We booked through Amex FHR, which claimed to include breakfast but turned out to only include only a $35 usd per person breakfast credit. The breakfast is expensive (I think a bottle of water is like $10usd?) and so we ended up spending well over $100 every day on breakfast. In the big scheme of things, whatever extra we paid here made absolutely no difference to us, but it felt incredibly cheap to me on the hotel's part.
Jun 2, 2023, 10:12 am
#23
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 323
Yeah. I guess I'm used to paying a % service fee on everything in Asia, so this didn't surprise or bother me as much.