the reason for choosing this venue was that my husband's friend got married at the Royal Cancun and they had a great experience.  we wanted to be away from Cancun so Playa del Carmen was a good choice i think. specially with 5th Ave where there are so many fun shops and nice to be able to hang out outside out the resort in 1 min! i think most guests were pretty happy with the venue to stay.

 

as for the planning was not so smooth…  we booked the venue on April 1st for Nov 22nd wedding date which wasn't too bad for the timing i felt like for destination wedding.  but the wedding coordinator (Elsa Torres) we had didn't seem so bright and she kept asking the same questions over and over, she got out guest's name wrong even though they were both talking in spanish (and both Mexican, not American trying to speak in Spanish), i got too frustrated at some point and hand everything over to my husband to deal with her.  i guess it maybe from the beach culture they just don't work the same way like how they do in Mexico city… even his sister thought the coordinator was incompetent. he kept it to the manageable level till it was a month before the wedding. Two things happened.

 

1- we don't get assigned with a venue coordinator will one month before the wedding, we have submitted every request for the wedding including the DJ service, but she disappeared for few days (we called and emailed everyday). we asked her for the venue coordinator info on Oct 21st, we didn't get it till Oct 30th, 3 weeks before the weeding. we leave on Nov 19th couple of days before the weeding for prep. we had 2.5 weeks to give the music request to the DJ and work with the venue coordinator and it was very tight, leaving me all stressed out :((

 

2- we already made the final payment on Oct 8th for everything including the photo booth, Elsa told me 3 weeks before the wedding that vender they use is booked and found another vendor for $300 more, so you can pay more or you can cancel the photo booth!!!!! my husband is usually calm but when he saw that, he lost it. we wrote to her and saying it's completely unacceptable and extremely unprofessional, she still couldn't do anything so  we had to call her and said to speak to the manager. she was busy so we told her we'll send a message so please read. we wrote a long message then 3 days later (after contacting someone higher) she came back and said no extra charge. it was just the last thing we needed in the crunch time and we shouldn't have to go though this much hassle to keep the price that's on the contract we signed...

 

once things were handed over to Ana Elisa, it was much better and specially how she was flexible about the requests we made i think she did an amazing job at the end. and the while evening was great :)

 

wedding specialist (for booking): Simplicity travel 

using the wedding specialist for booking and wedding details may work better for some people whose guests are very organized and don't mind booking 3 months in advance but i feel like it was quite frustrating for us at the end since our guests weren't organized. It's not much lower than what they offer directly (sometimes more) the only benefits of using them is that if you book enough rooms you can get some room credit, and they'll organize the transportation from the airport. but as guests made some changes and was delayed in booking she got nastier and she wasn't replying to my emails.  we have to make a deposit by July for the initial room block to pay $50/person so if we get the balance back at the end one people book and pay the deposit. and i was trying to figure out the total balance and kept asking for the balance, it took a month to get a balance (after i calculating the balance and she replied to correct it) there was some times the resort was offering lower rate so she had to come back with the better rate, but when i look back i should have cancelled everything and had guests book directly through to avoid more frustration. Since she was rude to some of his family who didn't speak good English most of his side booked directly through and got local rate (better than her rate)