Dreams Tulum review

 

Firstly let me just say after all the hotels I have been in to in the world Dreams Tulum far exceeded all my expectations and more. Choosing a hotel to marry in, comes with a lot of pressures, especially when you are taking over twenty people with you to stay in said resort. Well I needn’t have worried it was an amazing hotel, and an almost perfect wedding.

 

Check in C

 

The airport passport control is a nightmare took us almost an hour and a half to get through it but once we were through it and on the coach the hour and a half journey to the hotel went really quickly. When we arrived we were handed a hot towel, a glass of bubbly and a friendly smile – perfect way to arrive.

 

The actual check in was very smooth and the staff were very friendly.

 

Rooms B

 

A few of our guests had problems with their rooms when they first arrived. They were in the older suites and complained of damp smells. However we complained quite heavily and the situation got resolved.

 

However our room and the rest of the guests room were amazing –totally gorgeous. We got upgraded to the preferred suites and I tell you what if you can afford it is worth every penny. A gorgeous four poster, marble whirl pool bath, a walk in wet room, a mini bar re-stocked daily and our room had the most stunning view of the gardens and fountains.

 

Resort and staff A

 

Firstly the resort is beautiful – gorgeous grounds and so clean. The staff are out cleamning, sweeping, dusting all the time. I saw a lady clean the glass doors on the lobby at least four times a day. They also have people going round collecting sea weed off the beach, making little sea shell shapes out of sand in the ashtrays and just generally making everything perfect.

 

The gardens are quite simply breathtaking, the fountains gorgeous and the beach is by far the best beach I have ever been on. Sand as far as the eye can see, lovely greenery and the bluest sea ever. There is even a giant water trampoline out in the sea which the boys in our party had hours of fun on.

 

The staff were always extremely helpful, friendly and happy to do anything they can to help you.

 

Restaurants and Bars A

 

I cannot fault any of these either. The World Café (buffet) was probably our least favourite – we went there on our first night and the selection was poor. We used this every morning and the selection was good, not as good as other hotels I have been to but good enough.

 

However the other restaurants were brilliant – in particular the Sea Grill – best Steak and Shrimp ever!!!! The food was excellent wherever you went and cocktail selection was endless. Little tip don’t just rely on the cocktail menu they provide there were lots of other delicious cocktails they could make that weren’t on the menu – Mudslide is lovely. The drink of the day was always a good way to find out about them.

 

You couldn’t book any of the restaurants but we never waited for more than 20 mins even at peak time and normally we had very large parties of nine or more. When we were a party of four we walked straight in.

 

Bars –we never really used the ‘lively’ bar and instead preferred to take over the lobby bar which we loved.

 

Highly recommend Coco Café too, the cakes and lattes in the afternoon were a must!

 

Spa C

 

I myself never used the spa except for my hair and make up on the day of the wedding. However other guests, including my mum used it and they all said it was excellent.

 

Summary

 

Dreams Tulum delivered in every single way – and deserves every single one of its 5 stars. The beach is stunning, the food was always good no matter where you went, resort gorgeous, people friendly and it was the best holiday I have had.

 

Wedding review

 

Packaging – Ultimate Wedding

 

Wedding Co-ordinator – Aurora and then Annabel A+

 

In the run up to the wedding I dealt primarily with Aurora until she went on maternity leave a week before we arrived. All the way along Aurora was helpful, patient and very swift in responding. I never had to wait more than 48 hours for a response to a question and as an event planner in life I probably asked more questions than most but she was very patient all the way through.

 

On arrival we met with Annabel, two days before the wedding, and she again was lovely and extremely helpful. Thanks to bestdestinationwedding I had already decided on the locations for the wedding and reception so we simply met her and talked through the day. I had opted to write our ceremony so she went through that, the flowers, the canopy set up and all the other finite details. I had sent through our cetificates (by email) ahead of arriving in Mexico and she had arranged for the translation.

 

She also tied the bows for the chairs I’d bought, plus put out all the table decs id brought with me free of charge, even though in the price list it is normally $5 per person. A lovely gesture which meant neither me nor my guests had to worry about doing it and could just enjoy the day.

 

 

One thing to note – as part of our package we received a free steam for the wedding dress. We were to be wed on the Thursday so at our initial meeting she asked me to leave the dress on our bed and it would be collected and returned to me.

 

Sure enough by 11am on the Wednesday it had been collected, however it never returned to be until 10am on the Thursday (two hours before our wedding) and that was only after we chased it. So as an advice to future brides try and do it the day before the day before.

 

Due to rain on the day our reception had to be moved indoors and so a number of the items we’d booked e.g Tikki Torches etc hadn’t been used however we met with Annabel after the wedding and she happily refunded the money.

 

 

Hair and Make up  A for the actual result / B for the service

 

I went to the Spa the day before for a hair trial and was totally delighted with the result. Diana who did my hair followed my wishes to the letter and kept checking all the way through down to the last few stands of hair.

 

I had my appointment booked for 8.30am as the wedding was at midday. However Diana never turned up until around 9.10am which put me well behind schedule I never got back to my room till 11am by which time the photographer was already there which didn’t leave me much time to chill or get ready. That said she did an amazing job with both my hair and my make up and I was really pleased with it.

I was quite relaxed about it all but I know some brides wouldn’t have been

 

Flowers - A

 

The flowers were gorgeous and everything I’d hoped for Aurora and Anabel had really listened to what I wanted and everyone commented on how lovely they were. They even re-used the flowers on our canopy to put on the table for our lunch at El Patio which was a nice touch.

 

I’d ordered some petals for my flower girl to throw and twenty mins before the ceremony started I realized I had no basket but Anabel came to the rescue and sorted one for me with no problem

 

 

 

 

DJ - B

 

I was advised on BDW to use speakers on the beach as due to the wind it is very difficult to hear the ceremony, a great tip!! So we decided to hire DJ Bijan to do both the ceremony and the evening and overall he was excellent he got our music choices spot on and got everyone up dancing in the evening.

 

However unfortunately for him the resort had a power surge just before our wedding which blew the mics. This meant most of our guests couldn’t hear the ceremony despite our planning.  A pain, but there was nothing to be done, and it wasn’t anyones fault and to be honest it didn’t ruin our day  - we knew what was being said J

 

 

Ceremony – A because it was perfect/ C – because of the ceremony mix up

 

The ceremony was perfect. The Judge says it in Spanish and then Anabel repeated it in English. They got everyone’s name right and all went smoothly.

 

The only downside was somewhere along the way they had got the ceremonies confused and instead of doing the ceremony which we’d written – including two readings and our own vows – they just ended up doing a bog standard ceremony with normal vows.

 

Now some brides would have been extremely upset by this, even ruined their day. We wrote our own ceremony to lengthen a bit as we had heard the normal ceremony is very short. however to be honest it was such a lovely hot warm day that actually had we been out in the sun for any longer I think our guests would have died. (we were under the canopy so were fine!)

 

We were a bit gutted that we didn’t get to say our own vows but to be honest the day was just so perfect I cant complain and we made our friends do the readings when we did the speeches and I think we are going to frame our vows at home.

 

 

Photographer – Resort D/ Videographer C/ Sascha Gluck A+

 

As part of the package we got a photographer for an hour and a videographer. As we had hired our own photographer (more about him later) we decided to use the photographer for our cocktail hour.

 

I have to say I am very passionate about photography and getting good pictures was very important to me hence why we hired an external photographer and boy am I glad we did.

 

Although very friendly and more than happy to let us pose for group shots and did try to instigate some couple shots of my hubby and I, I have to say I was very disappointed with the result. They were just very basic and no real angle, or artistic direction behind them. However they were ‘free’ and we did get to choose 50 prints two days later as our first wedding pictures they were still nice to have.

 

The wedding video was a bit cheesy, but lovely to have. It was hard to hear a lot of the ceremony due to the wind but I think that may have been due to the lack of microphones. Its really nice to have it as a memory.

 

We spent a long time researching photographers, photographs are extremely important to me and marrying in such a beautiful place I wanted to be sure we chose a photographer which could capture it and our wedding perfectly. After looking at many, many websites I stumbled across Sascha Gluck’s (Cancun Photo’s) and just loved his work instantly. Upon contacting him he was friendly, professional and happy to accommodate all our requests. Although slightly more than we wanted to pay Sascha was worth every penny and more.

On the day of the wedding, he was here there and everywhere, in the sand, climbing trees - nothing was too much effort to get the perfect shot. Although we had only booked him for four hours because we had booked him and his assistant a room at our resort, he was happy to split the hours however we wanted. We used him for two hours pre and during ceremony, another hour for sunset pics, and then finally to come back in the eve for the first dance and to snap some fire dancers we had booked. He was so flexible and definitely stayed longer than we had actually booked him for.

We had booked a trash the dress for the next day, and although getting up at 9.30 the day after the wedding seemed like the last thing we wanted to do once we were up we had so much fun, and Sascha was so good, fun and efficient the time just flew past! Before leaving for Mexico I had sent Sascha a collection of his photos that I particularly liked just so he had an idea of the style I liked and bless him if he didn't try and recreate every one for us. In short Sascha was everything I could have hoped for and more, and definitely worth every penny. Although we haven't had all the pictures, the ones we have seen so far are just stunning and everyone I have shown has said they have never seen such impressive photos. I would recommend Sascha on every level and am so excited about seeing the rest of them.

 

 

Lunch/ Cocktail hour and reception – A

 

As our wedding was at midday we wanted to do everything we could to lengthen the day so we decided to pay extra to have a lunch in El Patio. This was the first time we had all eaten in there and it was great they were very attentive the food was great – four courses!!! – and the waiters kept topping my champagne up!

 

After this the ‘boys’ had decided they wanted to get their speeches out of the way early so we all moved to the Coco Café, found a quiet area there and did them there – it was perfect.

 

The Cocktail hour was great, I chose the Lobby terrace and it was great location. We had the Mexican Trio during the cocktail hour and they were great fun and people started boogying then!! The canapés were ok, not my kind of thing but nice to have a nibble while we were drinking copious amounts of champagne!

 

We had opted to have the reception on the beach, but at around 5pm the heavens opened and we had 20mins of torrential rain so DT moved our reception into the Seaside Grill. I was delighted!!! I had wanted to have the reception in there but with only 20 guests we didn’t meet the 50 people or more rule. So they set up one long rectangle table for us with all our lovely decorations set out for us perfectly, the DJ was set up too and had created a lovely dance floor next to the table which our guests took full advantage of. 

 

The food was the best food we had all week and our guests mirrored our thoughts. We had

 

APPETIZER:  Shrimp fried quesadilla

SALAD: Asparagus Salad

ENTRÉE: Surf and Turf

DESSERT: Vanilla Puff Pastry Cake

 

All were delicious. Even my mum who hates steak couldn’t stop raving about how amazing the steak was. Highly recommend it!

 

 

 

 

 

Fire Dancers – A

 

After dessert we had paid extra to have a team of fire dancers come into to entertain our guests. They were amazing and although expensive well worth the investment.

 

Cake - A

 

Following advice given to me on BDW we opted for the three milk cake with strawberry filling. It was really yummy, very odd mousse like consistency but the nicest cake I have ever eaten. I wanted to keep eating it but my dress wouldn’t allow it!!!

 

Summary - A

 

Although with all weddings there were a few hiccups, mostly they weren’t at the fault of the resort. For us the wedding was perfect, everything we wanted it to be and if I were to do it again I would do it all the same. The staff, especially the co-ordinators, work so hard to make the day perfect for you and with a backdrop like Dream Tulum it can’t fail to be a stunning day.