My husband and I just returned from our first trip to Aruba. Like others, we chose the Bucuti based heavily upon the reviews it received - the wonderful beach, the terrific customer service, and it's adults only atmosphere. I classify this hotel as no more than mediocre. It is nice, but in no way luxurious.

The beach is wonderful and lives up to it's reputation. If you are a beach person and are looking for serenity or tranquillity, this beach is it! Especially in comparision to Palm Beach. It is more spacious and a palapa will always be available. The palapas located closest to the water will be occupied by about 10am if not sooner. According to the hotel, they will remove any items left on the beach chairs for more than 1 hour in respect of other guests, but we never saw this for our entire stay which was a week. The sun is strong, and you will appreciate having shaded areas available.

The room is modern and basic, which I consider a good thing. I saw no bugs in the room at any time and it was always kept relatively clean. The floor was always swept, shower always appeared very clean, but the bathroom sink never seemed to get wiped down. The same water spots were on our sink for the majority of our stay. We also had run out of bathroom tissue at one point and it was never replaced, that was even after we used the spare. So I had to hunt down a housekeeper to get one. The complimentary soap, shampoo, and lotion were found in a dispenser located in the shower. This is done to be environmentally friendly, but did not seem very sanitary. I would have preferred the option of indiviual bottles even if it meant we would need to collect these items from the front desk on our own. I would have just preferred having the option. One last note about house keeping...in keeping with the environmentally friendly theme...on 2 occassions we returned after having our room cleaned and the fan was turned off and ac turned down. A bit bothersome to return to a warm room after an afternoon in the hot sun.

The customer service was spotty. Sometimes wonderful, other times not so much. For example...most everyone in passing greets you in some way. They are always readily available as well. An example of bad...upon checkin, they put 2 $300 holds on our credit card for incidental charges without telling us they would be doing so (one hold was placed in error, the card had been run twice since they did not obtain an authorization code on the first try). This is a detail I would have liked to be informed of. To have the second charge removed became quite an ordeal which took 3 days to resolve. I made multiple calls to the front desk and manager, everyone telling us the second charge would just disappear and to wait until the following day. We did this for 2 days. Not until a Manager named Olga had began to help us did this situation become resolved, she was very kind. We had dealt with another Manager and he did nothing nor did he seem to care about the inconvience their error had caused.

The pool was very basic. There are no shaded areas and because of the restaurant you can not view the ocean from the pool. The most shallow point is of the pool is 4 1/2 feet, which encourages the adult only concept. Although the beach is serviced often (drinks/food), service at the pool is seldom. A great positive is that you will find a lot of iguana's sunning themselves, which is really neat.

The restaurant had very nice customer service, but the quality of food left much to be desired and there was no variety, especially for lunch. We ate the continental breakfast everyday, it was adequate. The restaurant is located right on the beach, so it does offer a very nice view while dining. Not only do they have only 1 restaurant, they also do not offer room service. So if you would like to dine casual for the evening, you will find yourself leaving the hotel. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND renting a vehicle for your stay for this purpose. The island offers many options for dining, all much better than the Pirates Nest.

The concierge desk was helpful, informative, and friendly. The only bad thing was that when we wanted to book the ATV tour, although they recommended De Palm's ATV Tour, they could not arrange it for us because it did not meet their environmental standards. We had to travel 4 hotels away to a De Palm desk to book it ourselves. It was not a great distance and we had rented a car so only took us a short amount of time (we were on vacation after all), but still a bit inconvienent. They take their environmental stand very seriously.

Overall, the hotel was okay. Even taking the beach and peaceful atmosphere into consideration, I still would not rate this hotel as anything more than nice or mediocre.

We stayed at the Bucuti in May 2008 for our honeymoon. We decided on the Bucuti after seeing all of the positive reviews on this website and because it seemed ideal for a honeymoon. We also saw it in Trip Advisor's Top 10 lists. We were not disappointed.

Bucuti was a wonderful place and perfect for couples. The beach and property are very peaceful and virtually free of children. (We do like children, of course; we just wanted a couples oriented place for our honeymoon!)

We were greeted at check-in with champagne and our room had goodies for us as well -- a congrats balloon, cheese (Gouda-which seems to be everywhere in Aruba!!), a bottle of champagne, chocolate, and crackers. We were on the third floor with a lovely and peaceful view of the courtyard. We could also see the ocean. We really enjoyed the "privacy" and "make up room" buttons that are inside the room. The room itself was fairly nice, though we are not used to the type of furniture where the base is larger than the parts above (eg. base of bed sticks out from mattress)... so we both got some stubbed toes and a couple of nasty bruises walking around in the room! The only other bad thing about the room was that the bathroom counter was slightly slanted and water would collect on one side of the counter and just sit there. Room service wouldn't always mop it up and would sometimes just leave it.

The only other unpleasant thing about the Bucuti that we have to mention is that it was often noisy in the hallways during the daytime... though we never heard anyone from other rooms, the noise from the hall flows right into the room and was downright distracting. The repairs caused the most noise. You might have mixed results if you are trying to relax in your room in the afternoon.

The concierge desk at the Bucuti was INCREDIBLE!! The ladies were all so pleasant and took care of us completely. They will set up your dinners, tours, rental cars, romantic dinner on the beach, the complimentary honeymoon photo, etc. And they set my husband up with first aid supplies after he cut his foot jumping off a rock at the Natural Pool. They are so thorough and helpful that we did have to wait a while a couple of times while they were helping other people but their service made it worth the wait.

The beach was beautiful, with wonderful white sand and very blue water. We always went down late to the beach but still found a palapa around the second row every time. We LOVED how much space there was between each palapa. We saw in the high rise end of the island that the palapas are situated so closely that the people are practically on top of each other. We were shocked at how crowded it felt down at the high rise end of the island and were SO thankful that we didn't stay there. The Bucuti was really just what we were wanting... we are both pretty low key people just wanting to relax and enjoy ourselves, and that is what we had.

Some of our recommendations:

-the romantic dinner on the beach at the Bucuti - the scenery, experience, and service were awesome... they went out of their way to take gorgeous pictures of us with the sun setting (we took the early time slot to enjoy the sunset). The romantic dinner was my favorite part of our trip.

-we loved breakfast at the Bucuti -sitting on the deck looking out at the ocean every morning was awesome and the food was great!! A lot of times we got and split an omelette and they were delicious every time. (You pay for the hot stuff but the included food is wonderful too --great fruit, cereal, pastries, juices, milk, bagels, toast, etc.)

-ABC Jeep Tour that includes Natural Pool -this was my husband's favorite part of the trip. They will take a volunteer driver in the jeep(s) that follow(s) the first one so he got to drive and loved it!! After driving down to the Natural Pool, we recommend taking a tour to get there... it is really rocky going down and up and you need a true off-roading vehicle. I loved the Natural Pool and it was a great place to snorkel for my first time snorkeling.

-Snorkeling tour with Red Sail Sports - we took another tour (discussed toward bottom of review) with DePalm and Red Sail was so much better. They didn't overcrowd the boat like DePalm and they gave us really good food. We did the morning, 3 location tour and they had fruit in the morning and a full lunch with dessert in the afternoon.

-Dinner at Wacky Wahoo - the concierge desk recommended this place and the food was incredible!! It is inside though (not on the water or in a beautiful setting but was less expensive than most other places). Again, the food was awesome! This was the best food I had on the island.

-Dinner at Marandi - the food was great and the setting was very peaceful.. right on the water... this was my husband's favorite restaurant.

-Dinner at Papiamento- an old mission, very peaceful dinner, good food

-Renting a car!! We definitely recommend renting a car and enjoyed ourselves driving around the island. Aruba doesn't seem to be big on road names so relax and allow extra time to get to where you're going

-the Alto Vista Chapel - we enjoyed driving there and walking down from the chapel to the coast --it is beautiful, natural, and uninhabited on that side. Take good shoes for walking on the rocky, lava-like coastline. The ABC Jeep Tour that we took drives by here but doesn't stop so we came back.

Not recommended:

-We must be the only ones on tripadvisor to feel this way but we didn't really enjoy our Baby Beach trip... I had been so looking forward to it from everything I'd read... that we could snorkel and that it would be fun and enjoyable. No one mentioned to us that you are not supposed to go near the "second entrance" from the ocean to Baby Beach though... I started swimming over there and eventually realized that the current was too much for me. The ocean was pulling me out and though I am 31 and am able to swim, I couldn't fight it and was taking in water with the waves hitting me in the face. (The water depth was over my head where we were.) Luckily my husband was there and able to pull us in to a place where he could just barely touch the bottom while I caught my breath. There are no lifeguards around and I was acutely aware that the result could have been very bad had my husband not been there and God not been watching out for us. We spoke with a vendor afterward who told us there had been 8 or so drownings there in the past several years, with a few other very close calls. I never read this before we came to Aruba. If you do go, I would recommend staying not going near the second entrance. Also, as far as the snorkeling, we really didn't see too many fish.

-We would NOT recommend staying in the high rise portion of the island--it is WAY more crowded than the beach at Bucuti... the two aren't even comparable.

-We did the sunset sail with DePalm because it was part of the initial package we booked. We enjoyed watching the sun set and being on the boat but would have taken Bucuti's Sweetheart Sunset Sail if we'd known about it beforehand. DePalm packed so many people on the boat that everyone wasn't even able to sit when it departed (before we were allowed to go up on deck). They also limit you to 3 wings and 3 meatballs each for your food! The food we had with Red Sail Sports was so much better... much higher quality.

Overall, we loved our stay at the Bucuti and had a wonderful time in Aruba. The Bucuti was just what we were looking for -- peaceful, not in the high rise area, and couples-oriented. We would definitely go back and my husband has already mentioned possibly wanting to go back for our first anniversary.

My husband and I just returned from a 5 night stay (May 29-June 3) at the Bucuti. We loved the hotel and the beach, but had a few complaints. One day they decided to drain the sewage system in the middle of the day. The beach, pool area, and room smelled horrible! It would have been better if they did this either late at night or early in the AM when people are sleeping. Also, the last day we spent on the beach they decided to use a power saw on the deck at the Pirates Nest...again, during the busiest part of the day! My husband went in to complain, but the sawing and hammering continued. Also, beware of topless sunbathers! Other than those few things, we think the hotel was great. There was always an open palapa on the spacious beach, they always seemed to know the perfect time to clean our room, and the concierges were very helpful in making reservations for us. Continental breakfast was sufficient, but it would have been nice to have some hot food once in a while. We ate at:
Aqua Grill- good service, food was good, but not amazing
Pizza Bob's- Nice outdoor place next to Bucuti to eat lunch, they even had music one night
El Gaucho- our favorite meal on the island...the steak was amazing and the service was impeccable!
Pinchos- great place to watch the sunset, service was excellent, and they grill everything, so it was nice to eat healthy for a change
Gianni's- my husband loved the veal piccata here and my pasta dish was also delicious
Iguana Joes- went hear for lunch one day and enjoyed a huge taco salad
Flying Fishbone- very slow service, but it was worth the long drive and wait to experience eating dinner with my feet right in the water! The food was also really good!

We had a wonderful time at Bucuti. The best part about the resort is its boutique feel. It is very private, very quiet and the beach is pristine and BEAUTIFUL. Because the hotel only as 100 rooms, the proximity of the rooms to the beach is amazing. The beach, literally becomes your back yard.

The staff is very friendly, it has a lot of charm and while a lot of Aruba is filled with big, commercial, cookie-cutter resorts, Bucuti was not that, at all. I would HIGHLY recommend staying here. They show movies at the beach, have a great happy hour, we stayed five nights and it really begins to feel like home.

The rooms: are very clean...and while they're not beautiful, they were very nice. All of the rooms have either a little patio or a balcony, they're simple but very nice.

The ONLY criticism I have is the service. While everybody on the staff is extremely friendly and helpful and lovely, the hotel is stingy with ammenities, particularly towels. They're like towel watchdogs, and it became kind of stressful. For example, we spilled something and used our towels to clean it up, and when we asked for replacement towels, we were questioned about why we needed the towels and then were told we couldn't have them until housekeeping opened (which wasnt for four hours and we needed to be somewhere) Finally, when the towels arrived, they made us scramble around and collect the old towels and wash cloths before they'd give us the new ones. It was just kind of weird. They're also very stingy with their beach towels. Again, TOTALLY not a big deal, but over time, at times....it left me feeling like I was vacationing not at a luxurious beautiful beach resort, but rather at the house of a penny pinching family member who was worried they were about to go belly up.

That being said, it's a very small criticism. I highly recommend staying here and we had a REALLY really great time.