My husband and I decided to take a 4 night vacation since I am 4 months preggers. We knew we wanted something tropical with a close location (home base is STL) and an American hotel. We chose this hotel based on the previous reviews which all sounded good. I would not consider myself a hotel snob as we stayed at a Red Roof Inn the night before we caught our plane, but on the other hand we have stayed at the Four Seasons so I can pretty much handle anything as long as it's clean and there are no hair on my pillow. I will give you an honest review based on my own preferences. First off, I've seen a couple people who responded that they were not aware this hotel offered an all-inclusive package, but they do. We booked ours through Worry-Free vacations but you had to book a min. of 4 nights. I'm quite a travel hound so I did find it on Marriott's website but there was also the min. stipulation and since it was cheaper to book the package through Worry Free, we did just that. I estimated the cost to be about $600 more doing an all-inclusive for 4 nights as opposed to just booking the hotel by itself. In saying that, I was going to make sure I spent at least $600 to cover that over the course of our trip. The hotel itself is gorgeous and very family-friendly. There are always people walking in the hallway and the staff is more than helpful and always answer you by last name when you call for something. I would say this hotel was about 65-75% capacity and there was never a time you couldn't get something. There was also nightime entertainment in the lobby area that was fun at night. Upon checking in, we were given a sheet of the drinks, food, etc. that was covered. I've stayed at other all-inclusives and decided on this one because of the restaurants. Partly because there were no buffets and the restaurants looked good. The 1st restaurant we tried was Champions at lunch time. It's fun and the food is decent but they gave us a bill at the end. They did this every time we got a drink or ate at a restaurant. There was an area for a tip which we did leave but I wasn't sure how that would play out when we checked out because most all-inclusives you don't get a bill. With this a.i. you got 3 meals a day but no snacks are included so we just made sure we ordered an appetizer and dessert at lunch and that carried us through to dinner. The steakhouse restaurant was our personal favorite. We went to Japanese restaurant the 1st night and liked it but once we went to the steakhouse that was it. I'm not sure why they have a Thai restaurant there, to me it seemed a waste because it was too similar to the Japanese. It would have been better to have had a mexican restaurant. I ended up checking on our account balance 2 different times to see what our bill was because I didn't want any surprises and luckily at checkout the bill was $0. Aside from the alcoholic beverages, the a.i. was worth money. We estimated our bill at breakfast every morning was $35, lunch at Champions ran us $45-55 per meal/day and dinner at the steakhouse was $90 for our lowest bill and $125 for the highest. On average we spent $180 on meals aside from drinks so it was worth our while. Someone had said we should try the Italian place at JW but since our meals were free, it didn't make sense. One thing I noticed about the room which I wasn't too keen on was the rooms, they were quite small (we had a king-size bed) and the showers were kind of old. Since you don't spend a lot of time in there, it's ok but for the price, you would expect a little bigger room. The other thing I noticed after someone else pointed it out was the inconsistency. The 1st two days we receieved a USA today but the last 2, there wasn't one to be found. Some days they cleaned our room at 11:00 and others it was at 3:00. That kind of irritated me. Also, I read in other reviews that you could go over to the JW and swim at their pool but when we tried they would not give us towels because they said we could visit their spa or restaurants but not their pool. How kind of them, you can spend money at their place but not share it. There is a breezeway that connects the 2 hotels so we went to through the lobby one morning and I liked ours better but I did like the pools there because there were so many areas you can swim at and there was an adult pool. It's worth a walk over just to take a look. I also read that the Marriott did not have much beachfront access. We hadn't been back to Cancun since 2004 and since I'm preggers I didn't plan on going in anyways but please, please, please take into consideration that if you are wanting beachfront access you may want to rethink this place. There is a small place with chairs but the rocks are really too much to take a chance, especially with children. We walked both ways, on rocks and small walkways mind you but we wanted to find some decent beachfront access. We walked all the way to the Ritz and found nothing that I would consider "great" beachfront access. We also walked down to past the Omni and it was a little better. It's no big deal because I was going to swim at the pool but you at least like to dip your toes and I was severely disappointed in the access, although they can't help it due to the hurricane. I'm sure there has been lost business due to this. Other than that, this place is really beautiful and I think is worth what they are charging. I hope this answers any questions you may have and feel free to email me if you have additional questions.;
