We - a family of three, with one 7 year-old girl, stayed in this hotel during Christmas week of 2003. We had the 'all inclusive' deal - we strongly recommend it! This hotel has very good food and drinks, also the night show is quite impressive. Beach is pretty good, though can't compare with the best beach in Cancun. Room is very good, all marble, and very clean...during high season, might require some waiting time when check in, but you can relax in the lobby bar area and wait, which wasn't bad at all if you have 'all inclusive' deal to get all the free drinks there! Overall speaking, this is a great hotel to stay in Cancun with 'all inclusive' deal.

Okay, I just got back 3 day's ago and I am soooooo sad, because I had to leave. It was amazing. The drinks the food the staff ETC!!!!!!!!!!!, My favorite bartenders are definently Octavio and Hector. Jerry is my favorite of the entertainment staff!!!!!!!!!!!!! The shows were amazing, Me and my friend watched them every night. And for two 19 year old girls it was great, because the hotel goes to a different club everynight on a bus!!! The drinks were great never too weak. Basically I got treated like a princess. The activities are fun! Their was great cleaning service and they were very welcoming. On our last night we had Tequila shots brought up to our room before we went out. I loved it and have been planning my next visit their which will be again this year. I recommend this hotel to anyone. I guarntee after your stay you will not want to leave. And if you do you will be back in no time like me!!!!!
If any of the staff read this of the names i've put feel free to write back!!!!!!!!!

Family of four, children ages 9 and 11 at that time, vacationed at the Gran Caribe two years ago Christmas-New Year. Had such a great time and a wonderful experience. There was so much to do and see. Our children enjoyed the jeopardy slot machines, the swim up pool bar, the virgin daquairis and the courtious and attentive staff. The hair braiding, the poolside crafts (painting), and the water games were all just icing on the cake. Although we participated in the all inclusive, we didn't let it take advantage of us, ie. if we wanted to dine at another establishment we did, but we do feel the all inclusive is the "ONLY" way to go, it was so convenient with very tastful food and uplifting spirits! The facility was clean and we had no complaints. My husband (being the planner that he is) scheduled a bull fight, a ruins tour and a swim with the dolphins, this was just perfect for our weeks vacation.
You can't go wrong with the Gran Caribe for a family vacation. We plan on returning next Christmas.

Okay this might be long but I found this site to be so useful in planning my trip and want to make sure I don't miss anything! First of all, my husband and I went there on our honeymoon January 2-6. We are 24 and 29 and I have traveled quite a bit but my husband has not - this was his first time to see the ocean! Okay, no one in Cancun seems to know that the hotel has changed names. The sign outside still says Grand Caribe Real and none of the taxi or bus drivers knew what the Riu Caribe was...they kept trying to take us to the Riu Cancun. Finally we just stuck with calling it the Grand Caribe, and everyone understood. I was really hesitant after reading some of the reviews on this site but I think you would have to be a person who is never happy to not enjoy this hotel! I have traveled all over the United States and Canada and been to Mexico once before, and this hotel is very nice by any standards. The Ritz or Hyatt it is not, but if that is what you want they have those chains of hotels in Cancun also, so go stay there! We had no trouble checking in, it went very smoothly and we were given a room on the fifth floor with a king bed and a beautiful view of the ocean. I emailed ahead of time and told them it was our honeymoon and specifically asked for a king bed, I don't know if that helped or not but you can try. I didn't think the bed was hard, it was pretty firm but I had no trouble sleeping or getting comfortable. The room was spacious and clean, we had a safe in our room and a refrigerator full of pepsi, sprite, orange soda, beer, and bottled water. The first night we were there they came in and left us a bottle of Mexican liqueur and some wine glasses with a note welcoming us and telling us to enjoy our honeymoon, which I thought was really nice. The food has its good and bad points: we learned eventually to stick with the authentic Mexican style dishes. The first night we ate at the Albatross buffet restaurant, and the food was so-so. It is not bad, but they try to make "American" food and it is just a little off the mark. For example, we had some pasta dishes that were palatable, but did not taste like they would if you ordered them at an Italian restaurant in the US. My theory is that they don't have the same products and ingredients we do, i.e.
it would be comparable to a Mexican coming here and trying my enchiladas that I make with American products I buy at Wal-Mart. They probably wouldn't taste the same as enchiladas made with authentic Mexican ingredients. If you stick with seafood, steak, or the Mexican dishes, they are all delicious. For breakfast, Albatross was the best place to go, millions of choices of cereals, smoothies, fruit, pancakes, sweet rolls, bread, donuts, french toast, omelettes, any manner of eggs, sausage, and again several Mexican dishes, I especially loved the scrambled eggs mixed with sausage and ranchero sauce. They have delicious fruit also, I saw a guy walking back into the kitchen with some papayas that were literally the size of cantaloupes, they were huge! For lunch, we tried the pizzaria, and we both had the seafood pizza, which was delicious, but my husband was somewhat disconcerted by the fact that it is topped with actual whole baby octopi, with tentacles and everything. Similar to calamari but without the breading. Yummy, but not for the squeamish. We ate the other two days for lunch at the outdoor poolside restaurant, Gaviotas, which had a great menu but the food took a LONG time to arrive. I stuck with the make your own tacos, they were the best tacos I have ever had. A guy stands next to a huge slab of pork that is slow roasting, and you wait until enough has roasted and he cuts off pieces and fills up soft flour tortillas with the pork and onions and peppers. Then they have the best homeade fresh guacamole I have ever tasted to top them with - they are so good I wish I had some right now! You are never lacking for a drink in this place, they are constantly bringing you beer or whatever else your heart desires. The water coolers in the lobby bar and in the poolside bar are purified water, so they are safe to drink anytime. I didn't figure this out until the last day we were there, they cover the coolers with decorative cloths so you can't what is in them. We did tip frequently, we gave our waiters a few dollars and the waitresses on the beach a dollar every other time they brought us a drink. We took $100 in ones just for this purpose. They don't expect them but it does help you get better service - remember, the average person in Cancun makes $8 a day. For dinner, we ate at Senor Frogs one night. They have a gorgeous outdoor patio overlooking the ocean and yummy hamburgers and Mexican dishes as well...I had the Baja Fish Tacos and they were excellent. The seafood in Cancun is just to die for, it is so good. The other two nights we were there we ate at Maria Margaritas, I had read on here often that it was overrated, but we had a great time there - they have a different menu every night, so if you check it out one day and it doesn't look good, try again the next night. I had seafood dishes both nights and my husband had steak dishes, and we both found them delicious. The "salad bar" is a little odd, but had some good appetizers, and the soups were really good as well. They had delicious desserts in Albatross and in Maria Margaritas, again, their idea of certain things is not the same as ours. For example, one night the waiter at Maria Margarita's brought me some "chocolate mousse," which was really more like the Mexican dish flan (egg custard) with a chocolate crust. Luckily, I love flan, but it was not what I was expecting. Stay away from the red wine, it is really really horrible, but they have a good selection of liquors and if you like Dos Equis (which my husband and I do) you will be fine all week. I would have liked to have seen a bigger selection of beers but it seemed that most people were drinking mixed drinks while we were there, so maybe there isn't a big demand for different beers. Be sure and try the flaming Mayan coffee in Maria Margaritas, we had it both nights and it is the tastiest coffee I have ever had, not to mention quite a show! It is very helpful but not necessary to have a basic knowledge of conversational spanish, you are less likely to get ripped off on the bus and in taxis, etc. Activities: we went on the Jungle Tour, parasailing, and on the "SubSea Explorer" (a type of glass bottom boat). We booked all three of these activities for $100 a person at the Aquaworld booth by the pool, otherwise separately they are about $45 apiece. The Jungle Tour was fun, but you don't really go through a "jungle," more like some scrub brush growing along the edge of a lagoon. It was still neat to see the birds and the ocean and the coral reef they take you out to for snorkeling. We snorkeled for about 45 minutes to an hour, the whole trip took about 3 hours but was a blast.
Be sure and get a waterproof camera before you get to Mexico, they are selling them everywhere but they are expensive! Parasailing was really scary, but we got some great pictures. The SubSea turned out to be one of the best activities because they take you out on a double decker boat to the location of the SubSea, it is about an hour or a little more each way, and they come around and pour beer for adults or sprite if you would rather have that - the ride is through a national park and we really enjoyed just sitting on the top level of the boat drinking beer and enjoying the sun and the scenery. Note - if you plan on doing more than one activity through Aquaworld, save the yellow bracelet they give you when you check in at the Aquaworld location - it costs an extra $2/person as an entry fee for the national park to snorkel or go to the SubSea or to scuba dive, and if you save it for consecutive days they don't require you to pay again. My husband and I didn't know this and had to pay the $2 both times we went there, not a lot of a money and besides it goes to preserving the park, but if you had a large family it would be worth keeping the bracelets on an extra day! Buses are the best mode of transportation, 60 cents a person will get you wherever you need to go. Taxis will inevitably try to rip you off, I speak Spanish and they guy still tried to charge us $25 for a ride to the airport when it should really be more like $15. He accepted the $20 we gave him and I figured we were even. You can walk around pretty easily too, two of the evenings we were there we just went down to the plaza by all the nightclubs and wandered around in and out of different bars drinking and people watching. The nightclubs are fun, we went to Coco Bongo one night, but they are all pretty much the same and expensive, generally $30 or more for a cover with an open bar. I had been to Cancun before over Spring Break in college with my girlfriends, and I didn't even feel like I was in the same city - the nightclubs are definitely courting a different crowd, much calmer, less dance floor space, etc. If you see ANYTHING you like in a gift shop, go down to one of the mercados and you can get it for way cheaper, I promise. At the hotel they had vendors all over selling jewelery, smoking pipes, bags, sarongs, etc., we went down to the mercado and got some of my family members really nice jewelery (turquoise, opal, onyx, marquisite, etc.) for $5-$10. I also wanted to get my hair cornrowed for fun, and the hotel ladies told me it would cost me $60-$70. I went down to the mercado and had a lady do it for $15. Compare prices, they are all competing with one another around there and will lower their prices to earn your money! Also, don't ever accept the first price - THEY WANT TO BARGAIN WITH YOU, and their first offer is usually exorbitant compared to what they will sell it to you for. The hotel was really clean and the food was prepared well, I assume, neither one of us got sick while we were there and we tried a little of everything. Stick to bottled water and wash your hands a lot - part of the stomach trouble people get is due to the fact that we don't have our immune systems built up to tolerate their everyday germs, i.e. on common surfaces. When you walk around and touch elevators and handrails and chairs and tables and products at the market and then touch your mouth or you eyes or nose, you are just exposing yourself to millions of germs your body has never encountered. Wash your hands a lot and don't drink the water! Tip your maid for sure, we tipped well the first day and got flowers and towels shaped like swans in our room, and a completely restocked refrigerator, but the next day we forgot and though our room was clean our refrigerator was not restocked. We tipped her extra the next day and I left a note in Spanish explaining that we forgot and could we please have more beer and bottled water, and she restocked and left us a note in Spanish on our last day telling us how nice we had been and thanks for everything! The people there are very nice and will bend over backwards to make you happy, if you are just polite and tip occasionally. There were quite a few loud drunk people there while we were there, like a couple from Arkansas who were sitting at the bar and the woman was flashing her husband with her breasts when she thought no one was looking, but there were also tons of people there from all over the world, and quite a few families as well. The beach was gorgeous, there was some seaweed early in the morning but they rake it up and besides, what do you expect them to do about it? I mean, the stuff grows in the ocean, you can't really prevent it from washing up on occasion. We didn't have trouble getting chairs like I read a lot on this site, but we were up at the latest by 8 in the morning and generally lay out down by the ocean rather than the pool - my rationale is I can lay by a pool anytime, I wanted to soak up as much ocean atmosphere as I could! I did notice that the pool seemed to be more crowded than the beach. One day we even went down to the beach in midafternoon and still were able to find two chairs together. There aren't a lot of big waves at the hotel beach, it is pretty calm, but if you want real waves to surf or boogie board go to one of the local public beaches, they are beautiful as well and don't have the wave breakers out in the ocean to stop the waves from coming in. You see them all over town, look for the big blue signs that say "Aceso de playa" and follow them to the beach. We went to the Playa Chac Mool one day and saw surfers and a guy renting boogie boards out, we had a blast getting run over by waves taller than us. One thing - be careful for the coral and shells in the water and on the beach - they don't clean off the public beaches like they do the hotel ones, and you could hurt yourself stepping on that stuff. Also, I personally didn't think it was safe to have small children in the water at the Playa Chac Mool because the waves were huge and there was quite an undertow, but there were tons of local children there and their parents didn't seem to be worried at all. For calmer water, the Playa Gaviotas is just down the street from the hotel (near Fat Tuesdays) and has calm water as well as several shops, restaurants, and bars along the ocean. If you are interested in spa treatments, the hotel is way overpriced but just down the beach is an outdoor spa where you can get a couples massage right next to the ocean for $100 - and I heard some people say they bargained it down to $80 per couple. If you do decide to go down to the plaza and walk around late at night, say after 10 p.m., watch out for the drug dealers - they are not aggressive but will ask you if you want to get high or buy certain drugs as you walk by - we don't have kids but if we did I wouldn't want them to encounter that. Overall, don't expect it to be like America, if you aren't open to other cultures go to Florida!
They move at a slower pace and have a lot more fun in Mexico than we do here, just accept it and have a good time, after all you are on vacation! Feel free to email me with any questions!