- Waiting for a table at an a la carte restaurant
My wife and I and another couple spent the week of March 19th to the 26th, 2011 at the H10 Ocean Coral Resort near Porto Morales, Mexico. Porto Morales is a small, authentic Mexican town located approximately 20 km from Cancun and 15 km from Playa Del Carmen on the Mayan Riviera.
This resort is usually reviewed as a 4 ½ star resort and this is a very appropriate rating. Once checking in at the efficient front desk you will be introduced to a concierge who will try to interest you in a vacation timeshare. There are two classes of visitors at this resort. There are the regular riff raff and the Privileged people. The front desk will not allow you to upgrade to prestige/privileged after arrival.
The Privileged class get to go to any a la carte restaurant at any time and do not have to wait on arrival or they may make a reservation. The regular patrons must line up to wait to be seated at the restaurant (no reservations are able to be made) and the wait is usually 1 – 3 hours. The maddening thing is that there are usually open tables in the restaurants that are held in case a Privileged visitor happens by.
The food at the restaurants is uniformly excellent. There is an Italian, Mexican, Japanese, French crapier, Steak House, a buffet, a lunch time pool buffet, a coffee house with excellent deserts, and a sports bar with pub food. The quality of food is also quite varied so there is no need to fear that you may not find something you will like.
There are several pools from a quiet pool for reading and relaxing, to a boisterous activity pool to a kid’s pool so you can find a spot that suits your mood of the day.
That is a large window next to the tub!
The rooms are large and very clean. The beds are significantly harder than most North Americans are used to. A disconcerting element of the room is a large glass wall between the bathroom and the bedroom. You can see into the bathroom if the curtain is not across in front of the tub. The toilet stall has a phone in it and the stall is also made of frosted glass. There is no door to the washroom so beware if you are traveling with children.
One ever present irritation at most Caribbean resorts is the 5:30am wake up and trot to the beach or pool to reserve a chair with a towel. I truly do not understand why resorts cannot provide more loungers. Vacationers do not want to wake before 8:30 – we are on vacation remember!
The rank and file people who work at the resort (wait staff, bar staff, animators, etc.) are very friendly and have a very good command of the English language. It is not hard to learn “Resort Spanish” and you will enhance your visit if you can muster up a “hola” or a “cervesa, por favour”.
We also had great success with cab drivers in that they happily drove us from our resort to both Playa and Cancun and in each case they hung around until we were exhausted and brought us back. In each case we were given a running commentary of the countryside and the towns.
The beach is very white soft sand. There is a significant amount of sea grass that washes up on the beach during each night. The sea normally tosses out flotsam & jetsam regularly so the best thing is to just accept it. The hotel has a tractor that normally has it all cleaned up by 10:00am. The upside is that because of the sea grass and coral being close to the beach, the snorkelling is great. The downside is that while my wife and I were snorkelling in approximately 10 feet of water a man was attacked by a shark approximately 50 feet away. It was a smallish shark that removed the instep of his right foot and made two circumferential bites on the lower leg right to the bone. This left the tibia and fibula visible in both bite wounds. Luckily for this swimmer I am a paramedic, my wife is a nurse and the friend that we were traveling with is also a nurse. An Obs/gyn doctor showed up quickly and also assisted. The lifeguards on the beach wanted to leave this guy on the beach until the hotel doctor came down to assess the patient. I quickly went into my paramedic voice and started giving orders. We backboarded the guy and brought him to the hotel medical room. The physician there was overwhelmed by the trauma. I suspect he spends most of his time dealing with pink eye, vomiting and diarrhea cases.
Your traveler’s insurance doesn’t help if the physician you are being treated by is less than stellar. The patient was moved to a real hospital in Cancun and was treated at that facility quite well. The physician wanted $15,000 USD cash before he would take the patient into surgery. (You get reimbursed by your travelers insurance company but very few people have that kind of room on their credit card to get that large a cash advance.) The ambulance ride was $600 USD.
The hotel management really fell on their collective faces over this incident. They provided no help at all to the couple. They did not even provide a ride to the hospital for this gentleman’s wife. ($3USD each way). The hotel and the dive center at the hotel denied that there was any shark attack and allowed hotel guests to swim in the ocen at the same spot as the attack an hour later.
Bad things happen to good people but the least the hotel, in my opinion, could have done was provide a translator to the wife and a ride to the hospital. This would have cost the resort very little and would have gotten the resort a thumbs up from us Canadians.
As I rate this resort I will not return to it and I would suggest to prospective travelers to spend your money at other resorts. You are just a body here and the resort management does not care about you as a person. One thing I am paying for is customer service. You can rent a room and get fed at a plethera of places. I have based this decision solely on the lack of customer service.
Naturevision 