If you want a grass hut, poor service and very basic food you found it here! Ideal location and great guests made this an awesome trip but site brags about incredible food and service. Staff was good but management was abrasive. Considering the local market had great food available there was no reason we were offered beans and scrambled eggs and basic fruit every morning. Dinner was even less imaginative (canned fruit for dessert). Most guests chose to eat elsewhere even though food was paid for in advance. Over priced. Not recommended.

The setting is wonderful and the layout of the cabanas is inviting, but with so many other options along the beach be sure about what you're getting. Overall I liked the place but probably wouldn't stay there again. The rooms were sand covered which was a nice concept but you couldn't keep the bed clean, the beds left something to be desired, there was a nice breeze off the beach but the room I stayed in got little circulation unless you proped the door open. Security didn't seem to be a problem this far down the beach but there was no way to secure the windows. There was a nice open air shower, but the water was turned off during certain hours. It rained while we were there and some of my companions had leaky roofs and a couple bugs. No electricity in the rooms but you could recharge things at the bar in the evenings. The food was good but didn't have much selection in terms of local dishes.

We stayed for two nights at Retiro Maya in March 2008. It was supposed to be three nights, but the owner double-booked our prepaid room for the third night, and when she offered to return our money, we were glad to leave early. The beach is truly beautiful, but Retiro Maya's website does not paint an accurate picture of the accommodations. The cabanas--though scenic--are quite rustic. Sand floors, no screens on the windows, not so well kept open-air bathrooms with toilets that cannot tolerate paper, one or two very small candles to help you aim for bed when the sun sets at 7PM. Selling the place as an eco-tourism destination seems to be a ploy to get tourists to pay top dollar for a minimum of product.

It could have just been the time we visited, but there were a number of problems during our stay. There was no hot water for any of the three days we stayed at Retiro Maya. No soap or beach towels were provided, though a $10 deposit for beach towels was required when we checked in. Another guest's leftover glasses and dishes were on the porch of our (clean?) cabana when we arrived. The restaurant was not open the first day we were there--the cook didn't show up--and bringing food/drink onto the property is against the rules. The toilet basically stopped working our third day there. And then there was the issue of our room being double booked.

I can't recommend Retiro Maya, but can see how just a little bit better management of the place, a bit more hospitality, and a more industrious staff might change the whole tenor of a stay there.

We paid $150 per night for no drinkable water in the room, no screens on the windows, no hot water, all the floors are sand covered on purpose...great for getting into bed and sleeping in sand. The staff was very confused about everything. Beautiful location but that is about the best we can say.