Villa del Palmar, Puerto Vallarta

 We have stayed at almost all of the Villa del Palmar in Mexico and this apparently is the oldest one at 34 years.  The resort itself was quaint and right downtown on the beach and close to Zona Romantica or the Malecon.  The room in the resort that they assigned to us was very much in need of refurbishment.  New furniture and new kitchen cabinets would spruce this place up tremendously.  The coach was perhaps the fugliest in Christendom and possibly the most uncomfortable too.  It was even missing one ugly red velvet cushion.  The base cushion kept slipping out and I was close to burning it or throwing it off the balcony into the pool, white-trash style.

However, the unit we stayed in was very clean and had the best-stocked kitchen around including many kitchen gadgets that you would not even expect like hand-blown shot glasses.  I did not get a chance to use them much to my dismay.

The one-bedroom unit was very small, but it had two bathrooms which is a bonus.  We had a lovely pool view off of our balcony.  The one weird thing that freaked me out a bit was that our next-door neighbours could access our balcony and vice versa through about a one-foot wide space past the air-con unit.  They were nice people so that was ok, but I have never experienced this in all of my years of timesharing.  The balcony was equipped with a table and fugly blue plastic chairs- el cheapo looking.

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Every day that we went down to the beach or pool we had to wait for towels and I mean a Mexican wait time.  The longest we waited was 15 minutes.  They need to figure this out and get this fixed.  When people are on vacay they don't want to wait for towels.  We were chill but there were some angry people waiting with us.

Check-in was a long and frustrating one.  I had a Hotwire.com booking for one night in between timeshares and I coincidentally got the Mexican-Experience All-Inclusive 4-star night which happened to be at Villa del Palmar.  The only problem was that they did not honour the all-inclusive as they said that the Mexican Experience did not exist anymore. We did get a complimentary piece of cheesecake delivered to our room after we checked in and I thought that it was funny because they told me that the Mexican Experience did not exist but you should have seen our dessert.

Needless to say, I was major league peeved as I was looking forward to eating and drinking whatever I wanted to for one day.  Apparently, God thought that I did not need this experience and so we just had accommodation for that night.  I contacted Hotwire.com with their live chat and we got half of our money credited to our Hotwire account.  This has been the only problem I have ever had with Hotwire.  I have always done really well with them, but maybe my lunch has run out because we did not get the all-inclusive nor was this a 4-star room.  It was two stars at best, hell the couch was negative 5 stars.

The beach was fine but the Villa del Palmar does not have a big resort so their beach space was cramped.  Mexico has only public beaches so you can go wherever you want but you have to stick to your hotel's chaise loungers.  There was a volleyball court that we played on several times and we actually ran into two different people from Saskatoon, so that was cool.  But the coolest thing about this resort is that our room was 215 which was so easy to remember because back home this is our actual house number.  If you are bouncing around from timeshare to timeshare continuously, you actually forget your room number sometimes, but we never once forgot this one.

Villa del Palmar Puerta Vallarta