My husband and two children ages: 13, boy and 10, girl.
I selected this hotel after reviewing many comments from Travel Advisor. I wanted a smaller hotel that would give my teens freedom to roam without getting lost, all inclusive so I wouldn't have to play tour guide the entire trip, close proximity to town.

This hotel gave us all of this and more!

The food - There are 3 restaurants at the hotel. Mexican, Italian, and Japanese / Chinese. There was enough variety to keep us coming back for our 8 night stay! The Sushi in the Chinese restaurant was wonderful! The Mexican Cuisine was great. Had a great variety! The fresh fruit was outstanding! The Italian restaurant was wonderful! My son had the lasagne and could have had it several times during our stay! The food choices were great!
There are also a couple of lounges that are fun for adults and kids! The Luna Lounge is a great place for kids and adults and has wonderful appetizers!

The Service - impeccable! The staff at this hotel is so kind and so accomodating! The restaurants, the room service, the bar service, the best! Jorge Poot a waiter in the Mexican Restaurant is one of the kindest human beings we have met! He is a 5 star person, not to mention his excellent service he provided us during our stay!!!! The cleaning staff did an excellent job! Our room always looked and felt so clean! These wonderful people work very hard! We always left a tip after dining.

The Accomodations - We had room 208 on the second floor. We could open our sliding glass door and listen to the ocean! Our view was spectacular! We had one room which was spacious. Our refrigerator was stocked every day with beer, pop, soda. We had 2 queen beds.
The pool was fun and a great staff outside. Willing to get you anything you wanted to drink! We always tipped a $1.
This hotel is exactly what we wanted. It has 400 or so rooms which gave me the piece of mind to let the kids wander and yet able to keep my eye on them!

The location - We were right on the ocean, a wonderful pool, and 5th avenue (the shopping district) a few steps from the hotel! You can have any and all of the shopping you desire. For those of you who are hopeless Starbuck coffee drinkers, such as I, the mexican coffee was a good match!! However, there is a starbucks in the shopping district about 3 blocks away!!

We will certainly visit here again!!!

Extra's - We took the Coba excursion which we thought was great! However, when the bus tour guides tell you to buy at the first stop, don't do it! The prices are really high!!!! Shop after you have taken the tour at Coba. The vendors outside the ruins have better pricing. Some of them take CC, but charge you additional for them. Make sure you bargain with cash or credit up front. Example: My daughter wanted a stone turtle, at the first stop the turtle was $20 and my daughter bargained them down to $15.00. However, at the site, the same exact turtle was $8.00 with no bargaining! We gladly paid the $8.00!
We took the Paradise Sail Excursion also! This was really a great time. The beach is what you dream about! The light blue sky and the white sand beach with colorful boats in the water! We went snorkeling and it was fantastic. We didn't see a lot, but what we saw was great! My 10 year old was struggling snorkeling and one of the crew took her from me and was with her the entire time! He showed her fish, let her dive with him, she really had a great time and felt very comfortable. His name was Aquaman (real name Reheem)!!!! Wonderful time! After the snorkel you have a couple of hours. We spend ours with Parasailing, which was about $68.00 per person! I think this was the best set up I saw anywhere!! Very safe! I also had a 30 minute massage! It was a wonderful place to have a massage, in an open upstairs cabana. I won't say it was the best massage I have had, but the location and the breeze with the sound of the ocean, was unbelivable!

The additional excursions we took were not through the hotel. Discovery Jungle - ATV's and Zip Line!!! What a kick! We rode ATV's for about 40 minutes, unloaded and trekked through the jungle and rode 3 seperate zip lines! We had so much fun and the staff was wonderful!!! They were fun and did a great job of leading us around! The Cenote at the end of the rides was so awesome!!! The cool water and the cave surroundings, unexplainable!!!
The other execursion we took was Delphinus!! The kids got to swim with the Dolphins for 50 minutes! In my research on this, we found that the hotel also offers one, but it is about 12 people to one dolphin and it only about 30 to 40 minutes. So you might not get to do anything but touch the dolphin. With Delphinus they were able to touch the dolphin, give them instructions, and do the foot push!! The was cool! The Dolphins come from behind and put their nose on their feet and take them through the water, which makes them come up out of the water, like the are walking on it.

Overall, I have nothing but good things to say about this hotel and it's staff! I highly recommend this for anyone who is looking to relax, have fun, get a tan, shop, etc.

Also, this is an easy hotel to book online as well. If you want the extra execursions included, make sure you include the Gold Pasport to your reservation!

My family and I ( 2 adults, 2 young teens)stayed at the Playacar Palace the week after Easter. The reason I choose Playacar Palace was for the location: right next to Playa del Carmen. None of us were disappointed. If your the type who likes to sit and plop on a beach and not go anywhere, then Playacar may not be for you. There is not much a of beach at the hotel. Indeed, it was even closed one day due to strong waves. If you like to explore, though, Playacar is a great location, about half way in between Cancun and Tulum. Also, it's a two minute walk into Playa del Carmen where there is plenty of bars, restaurants and shopping.
The room at Playacar was a little tight for the four of us. All the rooms seem to come with a large jacuzzi tub in the room which is nice but takes up much needed space. The rooms are clean. The food at the buffet is great. We did not think much of the two restaurants on site, but I would have no problem eating at the buffet every night. I can't say enough about the service staff. Friendly, warm and a pleasure to interact with. All in all I felt the management at the hotel was first rate.
One of the best things we found about the Playacar Palace was we were able to visit the other Palace hotels at no cost. The ferry to Cozumel is a short walk and the Cozumel Palace was a ten minute walk from the ferry on Cozumel's side. It made for a great day trip. We also rented a car for a few days and drove up and down the coast, visiting beaches, cenotes ( a must ) and the other Palace Hotels. The Xpu-Ha and Aventura Spa Palaces are short drives away. ( Aventura Spa is adults only.)
If your looking to explore a bit and want to stay next to town with some night life and don't mind not having a great beach, the PLayacar Palace will fit well with your plans.

We were booked into the Cozumel Palace. When we arrived there they didn’t have our reservation. After nearly 3 hours of waiting they said they could put us up at the Playacar Palace in Playa de Carmen since they were full there in Cozumel. Of course they blamed the travel agency who booked it and the agency blamed the hotel for messing up the booking so we, the traveler, were left in the lurch with little help from either of the above.

The hotel never offered anything to make this right for us other than saying they were full. We finally asked for some help here since we were booked to scuba dive the week in Cozumel. The hotel finally agreed to give us ferry ride tickets from Playa to Cozumel on the dive days but that would mean catching the 6AM ferry for a 30-45 min ride one way. That just wouldn’t work out. We ended up diving on the Playa side at Dive Adventuras (which was probably one of the better dive outfits on that side) but it was located more than half an our south of the Playacar Palace by shuttle that we had to pay for. The diving cost was higher by about $20 per dive from what we had planned in Cozumel and the diving was not very good at all. Rough waves, my wife got sick the fist day and was not able to dive the remainder of our trip. There is not much to see on this side compared to over in Cozumel where we have dived before. We would never come back to Playa do dive (except maybe for cenote dive). We also lost our dive deposit on the Cozumel side since we weren’t able to dive there.

Once we arrived at the Playacar Palace they were even less helpful. It was later in the evening after the ferry boat ride from Cozumel. They didn’t explain any of the hotel amenities to us or give us any sort of orientation. It almost felt as if we were a bother for them being transferred from Cozumel.

We had problems with our room, dripping condensation from the air conditioner that made the floor slippery. We had to place a large bath towel on the floor there for the entire week. The shower handle came off and it took several calls to get it fixed. They were prompt to fix things but missed the shower handle twice until I had to take it off and show them. They had to replace our in-room safe one morning. They rooms were smaller than were we were supposed to stay in Cozumel. By the way this trip was to celebrate our anniversary and to dive. It took repeated trips to the help desk to get our ferry passes. It cost us $5 every time we needed to check our email.

There was no beach to speak of, only a very small sandy area in front of the hotel and no way to walk along any beach from this location. Its location to the ferry pier made our walk with all our luggage not too bad, its good we are in pretty good shape. And it is close to the 5th Ave. shopping district. But seeing that once was enough. There wasn’t anything to do at the hotel other than eat and sit by the pool or watch the surf. We did check out the Adventura Spa Palace but had to pay $40 round trip taxi fare to see it. They wouldn’t even shuttle us from Playacar to the other Palace resorts (other than the long ride to Moon up north).

This was a very bad experience. We will never come back to the Playacar Palace. We never would have gone there in the first place except that’s where they stuck us after messing up our reservation in Cozumel. Oh, and did I mention that no one at the hotel was willing to do anything to make this right for us. The help desk has the gull to offer us a Champagne breakfast and take more of our time so they could sell of a time share.

The only good thing was we could hear the sound of the pounding surf with our balcony door open at night which made it nice to sleep by. Most of the staff was friendly but the ones who could have help us with our situation never came forward to help and those who could have asked for us didn’t. I would have rated this review as 2 stars but the sound of the surf really wasn’t in their control except for when they built the hotel at that location.

Still waiting for someone to make this right for us. But of course I know better than that.

My husband and I spent one wonderful week at Playacar Palace. We returned just last night. The hotel was beautiful! Our room had the most amazing view. The staff were great...very friendly, but not overbearing. We were never asked to see a time share presentation. The food was good....better than a cruise. We took advantage of two of the tours. We also took the ferry over to Cozumel for some snorkeling. We had an absolutely amazing time.