We stayed at the Condovac La Costa in Playa Hermosa in Guanacaste province in Costa Rica. The hotel is in a nice location on a hill overlooking Playa Hermosa especially from the pool and restaurant. So if you don't like climbing, look else where.
We booked it as a timeshare exchange through RCI but you can rent it as a normal hotel. The resort is an older hotel that joined RCI in 1977. The rooms are Spanish hacienda style one bedroom suites with a kitchenette and a futon sofa. The room has AC in the bedroom but only a fan in the kitchenette.
We had a problem with tiny sugar ants looking for food in the kitchenette area. If you left anything edible, they pounced. We told the maid and she gave us a can or raid!!!
The hotel has decent facilities including a workout room, a outdoor theater area where 6 employees would do live dancing performances to the tune of latin music, Costa Rican music and variety show, mini-mart, game area and disco room.
The live variety show was free and pretty good. Since the hotel has hills, to their credit they have shuttles that take you from the beach all the way to the top (reception or restaurant).
Our biggest gripe with the hotel was that they had a deal with Grayline tours to sell excursions and limited access to other tour operators. They seem to try to sell you rental cars etc so if you need a hotel somewhere else and they can't make money on it they will help. But if you are looking for an excursion that they do not have, they probably won't help because they probably want you to take their excursions.
We booked a canopy tour and a horseback riding tour and inquired about rafting. They told us the good rivers were in the other part of the country. The nearby rivers were only level 1 or 2.
The Grayline representative didn't even mention that in a town about 45 minutes away (Canas) there was a place called Rios Tropical Rafting Trip which had good rafting trips down the Coribici river. We did it and had a blast. It was an 8 mile ride down the river with level 1-4 sections. We even had a 12 foot drop which was a blast (we did it twice and I fell in the water twice!).
When we were returning from Playa Del Coco from some shopping we got a fortuitious taxi lift from a tour operator named German Bonilla (337-1536). He was a really nice, honest guy, gave you a lot of information and spent all day with us. He speaks limited English, but since we spoke Spanish it wasn't a problem. If you book him and need English translation, he will have a fluent person ride along.
What really bugged us a guest about the hotel was that if you want to have your representative pick you up for excursion or simple taxi trips, the hotel would not let them in because they wanted you to use Grayline or taxi services that I believe pay the hotel commissions for access. It got to the point that if we had to do it again, we simply would rent a car and hire a guide.
Therefore I would recommend the Condovac La Costa hotel is you are tolerant of imperfection and don't have a huge ego that requires you to have Four Season service. Oh by the way if you happen to be military or retired military, check out [--]. It is a RCI clearinghouse of timeshare and condo inventory for timeshare exchanges set up for military families to get an affordable vacation. You can get rooms for $299 plus tax including Condovac La Costa the week we stayed.

Costa Rica is very expensive for the average person. We had frequent flier tickets and had our hotel exchange. If you rent a car, take excursion with food etc, expect to pay about $300 a day for a family of 4. You can save on this by renting a car, driving to the excursion such as Arenal and Monteverde and cooking meals in your room. The white water rafting trip costs us $90 a person including snack and lunch plus $35 for the CD containing digital pictures. We also had to pay $100 for our tour guide to take us there so it cost us $495 for 4 people to go rafting for 3 hours!

P.S. Do not forget your iron, because they don't have irons or ironing boards in the rooms and they will not lend you one. Also internet access is a bit pricy at $3 an hour. Do your internet access for $1 an hour in Playa Del Coco or other local places.

If you are looking for a resort to hang out in and never leave the property, go somewhere else. Condovac is not the place for you. However, if you just want to have a place to sleep and shower, then it’s okay.

First a couple of cautions:
CAUTION: Under *NO* circumstances should you eat at the restaurant. It is overpriced and disgusting. My wife was almost in tears as the food was served, ½ naked ticos were running around, and the cats were rubbing up against the table. But never fear, we grabbed a six pack of Imperial and hit the beach and the tears soon subsided.

ANOTHER CAUTION: Most places around Playa Hermosa take credit cards (just make sure you call your card and tell them that you are going to be in Costa Rica), but if you do want cash bring it with you from home. The ATMs there are sketchy and rarely work, I tried several ATMs in the area a dozen times and only ever managed to get out $10 total. Condovac offers to cash traveler’s checks without a fee, which they did. AFTER we had made the trek up the HILL for the 6th time (all the other times they would tell us that they didn’t have enough cash – but 10minutes earlier they could’ve helped us out).

Now the good stuff:
We were in Costa Rica for our honeymoon and had an amazing time, even for the week that we were in Condovac, though we did just use it as a place to sleep.

Playa Hermosa is one of the best scuba diving spots on the pacific coast (though don’t go expecting it to be the clear Carribbean, this is the Pacific wer’re talking about – 40 feet visibility at best. But it’s not how far you see in CR, it’s what you see. We swam with five or six 20ft manta’s, a school of fifty or sixty 8ft devil rays, white tip reef sharks, several other large sting rays, Morish Idols, tons of puffers, and a couple of sea horses). We dove with Diving Safaris and they were awesome for the diving, the service, and the restaurant recommendations.

We also took an all day adventure pass with Hacienda Gauchipelin ($70 each) which included the best zip line tour we’d been on, a horseback ride through the jungle, 2 hours of white water intertubing, and a trip to the spa for a volcanic mud bath and hot spring soak. Oh, all that and a decent lunch.

The hike to the waterfalls in El Rincon de la Vieja was strenuous, but spectacular.

Playa Flamingo is an awesome white sand beach that we spent a couple days at. Don’t visit Tamirindo unless you are missing the US, because it’s basically a southern California beach town (our guide book told us not to worry if we were in Tamarindo and started to get sick of the hustle/bustle, because Costa Rica was a few kilometers away – never a truer statement).


The best resturaunts were: Hotel Villa del Sueno ($$$), Ginger ($$$), and El Velero ($$ wed and sat nights are seafood bbq) in Playa Hermosa, Comida Dorado ($ - in Bracilitos). Papagayo was good at the 4-seasons also ($$$$$$$$$$).

The resort itself is old, but clean. As other reviewers have mentioned it is mostly Tico families, who are running up and down the STEEP hill that Condovac sits on. The other views were pretty dead on too when the mentioned the large amount to ‘stray’ cats running around. This is not the place for a secluded romantic getaway.

The rooms are good sized and the AC works well (except for the few times that I think we overworked the poor thing and it started leaking in the middle of the night). The accommodations are sorta like an oversized motel 6, nothing luxurious, but no blood stains on the walls.

The Condovac is horrible, don't waste your money. The resort is out-dated, the pools are border line and the jacuzzi is the coldest pool there. There is nothing to do there and the next town (Coco beach) over has about 10 shops and will cost you about 20 dollars round trip. If you like to explore this place is not for you or if you like to stay and rest at the resort you will find your self traped and bored.

The other guest are mostly from Costa Rica or S. America. This is what made our vacation the pits. We had a problem where there were two 8-10 year old boys that coner my 4 year old daughter in the kid pool and de-pants her and push her around and there parents were laughing about it. When I confronted the one of the dads. He started to have a problem with me calling me names in spanish. Another issue that made me mad was when I was playing with my two year old in the pool letting him get shoot the basketball and one of the local nationals just came over and stripped the ball away from him and started playing with his son at the other basket in the pool. And also which drove me nuts is that these people would also put there belongings on our beach chairs even while we were sitting there and they love to cut you in lines.

So do yourself a favor and don't waste your time. This place is a nightmare and is a rip-off. Please don't find out for yourself.

We traveled to Condovac via RCI exchange from March 2-9th. Our directions were sketchy - when we arrived in Costa Rica and were enroute to the resort we contacted the resort to get more details and to be sure we could check in late (we were expecting to get there around 10 pm). They gave us directions that included "follow the signs that say Condovac" and failed to make clear that their check in desk would be open. We laughed because we only saw "one sign" and that was the one at the entrance gate. We were happy their desk was open late for check in.

Overall not so bad but the rooms are pretty dated. The beds and pillows were ok. - other reviews feel differently on this. The a/c is located in the bedroom up high above the dresser. Couple of times had to watch for slight drippage coming down from the ac onto the dresser. The remote control that works the a/c did not work properly and we had to manually adjust the airflow direction. No big deal, we were glad the a/c worked. It did not cool the kitchen/living room area adequately though. I was told by another quest that the rooms are actually supposed to have 2 a/cs in them and that some do. This would have been more comfortable but we managed ok. It was nice to have a kitchen, even tho dated we cooked and enjoyed a few good meals. Bathroom was ok, liked the hanging spot for wet clothes and the window that our end unit had in the bath. I often closed off the bedroom from the rest of the unit to keep it cooler. In the evenings and early mornings we enjoyed the fresh, natural air but midday would be too hot without the a/c.

We stayed in room 404, nice view. This location is approximately half way between the top of the hill ( which is where the pools and restaurant is ) and half way to the beach down the hill. When the weather was cooler, we often walked to get a little exercise. Otherwise, I found the free shuttle service which is offered by the hotel to be convenient enough. The beach was nice, except I felt the time share sales people were intrusive. Again, no big deal. We tried to snorkel and spear fish off the lava reef here but nothing to see or catch really. Visibility was not good and the sand is dark so that makes a difference
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The staff here was courteous and they responded to our requests. Our ceiling fan went out and kitchen sink was stopped up. Service repairs were done immediately. The main problem we encountered at Condovac was that their internet service was down. The time share resort right next door had working service so I found this puzzling and needless to say, very aggravating. We had rented a 4wd Toyota Rav4 from Allamo and drove to surrounding areas - my companion was a surfer and this beach is not for surfing so we would venture out to nearby areas that provided this for him. He took the boat out of Playa Coco to Witches Rock and Ollies Point. Highly recommend this for the surfing enthusiasts. (You can drive to reach WR area also, most people will tell you otherwise but we were told it was possible.)

The pools were nice, not crowded and there was a wonderful view from the infinitiy pool and restaurant. Things I would do differently next time: TAKE LESS - especially CLOTHES - go ahead and free yourself of lugging things you probably will not use. Really, simple is better here - you can wash out the items you have. An insulated drinking mug for cool or hot beverages. Leave most of the "primp stuff" at home - you'll be glad you did. Dont forget: binoculars, compass, insect repellant, small thing of clothes detergent and bug spray, soap (theirs is very high in detergent), sani-gel wipes, invest in a good map, a bag type cooler, reef shoes, calculator, pen, small notebook, zip lock bags (never have enough lol), sun block, small scissors and flash light.
Explore and enjoy! Pura Vida.