For anyone who goes to Costa Rica and expects 5 star luxury, don't go. We stayed at three hotels during our vacation (my wife and I) and the Tango Mar was the majority of our vacation.

We stayed at the Tango Mar for five nights and loved it. The beach is perfection, it is a golden sand and the ocean is warm. We ran on the beach every morning layed in the sun in the afternoon. It is private, peaceful and extremely clean.

The Tango Mar is a small hotel but offers a couple different options in which to stay. We stayed in the standard room instead of the Tiki Suites because it is closest to the beach and pool. Plus the standard rooms have a balcony overlooking the ocean. The room was clean and comftorable and the bathrooms were very nice (Walk in showers... good water pressure).

The grounds are beautiful, full of flowers and palm trees. There is no lack of tropical feel. The pool is small, don't expect to do any lap swimming but it was well kept.

The staff was fantastic. We knew everyone of them by name and they go out of their way to make sure you are comftorable. There are trips offered by the hotel that let you explore differnt parts of the area. We took a boat ride out to Tortuga Island to do some snorkeling and sea kayaking. It was nice but not spectacular. The hotel also offers horseback riding excursions, guided trips through Curu Wildlife Refuge but we were lazy and this was our part of the vacation to relax.

The food was what kept this review from being a five star rating. The breakfast was great, fresh fruit, omelletes, belgian waffles, pancackes etc.. The lunches are also very good, I like casadas... get to know what that is before going to Costa Rica. Dinners were generaly disapointing. They tried, but we are snobs when it comes to food and were not impressed.

If you are looking for peace and quiet in a tropical setting this is a sure thing. Oh and you will miss the coffee when you go home!

If you have been to Tango Mar after 2003 and you did not like this resort / hotel you need help!!

This place was great! Ok it is not the Maldives but hey this is Central America.

It was clean good condition excellemnt food best staff I have ever had the pleaseure to be in contact with. And I have stayed in some of the best hotels around the world.

NOTHING NEGATIVE here. No gym but who cares go for a run outside!!!

GOOD GREAT EXCELLENT WILL BE GOING BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My husband, a friend, and I stayed at the Tango Mar for two days mid-October. We rented two of the Tiki suites (high price rooms). The rooms were OK; as a previous poster wrote, the rooms were nice but not luxurious. The hot water didn't work for a good portion of the stay, and the owner parked her golf cart in the parking space below our suite for the entire stay. Luckily, we'd rented two rooms so we had a space for our rented 4x4 but we had 3 times the amount of "stuff" that had to be transported from car to room.

If we go back to the Tambor area, we'll most likely stay somewhere else.

We had two splurges on our holiday. One was five nights at Tango Mar on the Nicoya Peninsula. This place looks great on the outside, but it doesn't take much scratching beneath the surface to figure out that it is badly in need of a facelift and a full body workup.

We were booked into a Tiki Suite, the most expensive and private room on offer. The guy at the front desk showed us in and at first glance the room was great. Not totally luxurious, but certainly unique and interesting.

The first thing that caught my eye was the colony of small insects crawling around the bar counter. I know insects are unavoidable in the tropics, but even the host seemed suprised at the level of insect activity inside the room. We also noticed plenty of ants on the bedspread (this room had no mosquito net). The host sent for someone to spray inside the room almost immediately. This took care of the insects for a bit, but in no time they were back, in force and en masse.

There were cracks in the floors and walls, through which columns of ants were coming in. At $200 a night, I'd expect that holes like that would be sealed up and the room would be a little more bug-proofed.

The bathroom was okay, but definitely not luxury. In fact, I was suprised by the old shower curtain that still hung. Which luxury hotel still uses grimy shower curtains?

We ended up moving into a standard room on the third-floor of the main building, thinking we'd have less insects there. Wrong again. At a few minutes to six every night, the room filled, this time with giant ants, also coming in through a crack in the ceiling. Some of these were fire ants; some got into the bed.

The toilet seat was really old, scratched up and not even the right size for the toilet. The bathroom counter was made of wood--which would have been more interesting if it, too, hadn't been scratched, battered and cracked.

The pool was tiny and not well maintained at all.

The food at the restaurant was pricey, and although it tasted alright, it was totally uninspired. Silly me, I kept ordering different salads from the menu thinking the next one would be better. But, despite great descriptions and a price tag of $5 or more, no salad consisted of anything more than just a mound of iceberg lettuce, shredded carrotts, a few tomatoes and cucumbers, along with perhaps a couple of overcooked asparagus or a piece of two of avocado.

Also, it was very difficult to communicate special requests to the waiters like "no butter, please" or "salad instead of french fries" even when we spoke to them in Spanish!

Future guests would do well to know that despite Tango Mar's seeming proximity to the town of Tambor and its nearby resorts, as well as to Montezuma, only the bravest of drivers would venture out on the roads at night in search of other meal options (which remain few and far between). Guests are pretty much relegated to dining in for three meals a day.

Tango Mar, on the other hand, would do very well to vary its menu. We were bored with the same six options by day two and we were unsure why the waiters insisted on starting us off each time--lunch and dinner-with the drink menu when we ordered the same thing at every meals.

We also found it strange that our mini-bar was never replenished in the five days that we were there.

Tango Mar needs an exercise room, though the tennis courts did offer some much needed physical activity.

At least the beach was nice. Very nice, in fact: long, quiet, secluded and clean.

If future guests are looking for a luxury experience on par with other Caribbean seaside resorts, Tango Mar is not the place. Not now, anyway.