Royal Hideaway Playacar

We were definitely some of the youngest people which for us was nice. I liked that it was adults only, small pools close by the room. The food was excellent and the service and drinks were great! The only complaint is our dinner reservations were a bit later than I would have liked but it worked out. Good breakfast buffet and nice beach! I would definitely return. The spa was a splurge but well worth it!

Hi, the hotel is very nice, clean and while kept. I wish I knew these 3 things before I booked, so hopefully these will help you. 1. you need a reservation for dinner at EVERY restaurant at the resort. You won't be able to eat dinner at any time if you don't have a reservation. Nobody tells you this until you try to walk into a restaurant for dinner the first night. then you need to scramble to try and get in to restaurants for the rest of your stay. We ended up eating at 8:30, 9:30 and 10pm the other 3 nights of our trip. 2. The resort lets people reserve sunbeds without using them. This creates a situation where at 10:30 am there are several empty pool chairs with a book or a t-shirt on them with nobody using them. Most 5* resorts don't allow this or make it easy for people to show up at the pool at the time they want and get a pool chair without an issue. 3. Don't take no for an answer. Every morning at breakfast, we were told there were no tables available on the outdoor patio when i could see several empty tables. When i asked, they eventually let us sit there but it was frustrating that we had to do this. If you keep these 3 things in mind, you'll have a really good time.

I stayed for 2 weeks in April 2018. I have stayed at the hotel a few times, both before and after Barceló took over the hotel. I think Barcelo has made some positive improvements to the hotel - the rooms have all been freshened up and the balcony furniture has been upgraded and is now comfortable, the main hotel bar (Allegria) is much better than it was before. The rooms are spacious, clean, very comfortable with comfortable mattress and good quality bed linen. I stayed in room 2827 which was lovely. Provided you can manage stairs (as there are no lifts in the villas), it is generally best to have a room on the top floor of a villa because then you will not get any noise from rooms above you and nobody can walk past your room on the balcony side, so you have more privacy. It is also generally better to have a room which is not near the boundaries of the hotels on either side of the Royal Hideaway as those other hotels are quite noisy. The whole hotel and grounds are very clean and well maintained. The staff members are all very friendly, hard working and helpful. There are three options for breakfast - a buffet breakfast at The Deck / The Grill restaurant (ground floor near the beach), an a la carte breakfast at Spices (top floor near the beach, above The Deck / The Grill), and a la carte room service. To be honest, the breakfast is good but not great. I found the breakfast selections to be the most underwhelming meal of the day. Lunch is offered at The Deck / The Grill and at Spices, with the occasional poolside BBQ on offer. Lunch options are good. However, the hotel is really all about the dinners at night time. My advice is that you should not get stressed out about dinner reservations and you should not bother emailing before you arrive at the hotel (because most of the time emails are not read or understood properly and not actioned). What you should do though is make friends with your villa concierge on your first day or second day of your holiday and get them to book all your dinner reservations straight away. Dinner reservations can be changed later if plans change, and there is usually flexibility if you smile sweetly and ask politely for changes. All the restaurants are good. In my opinion, Spices (Mexican food), Palazzo (Italian food) and Azia (Japanese and some pan Asian food) are the best for dinner in the evenings and they definitely had the best service when I was there. Personally, I found Las Ventanas to be disappointing this time

From the moment we arrived, the staff was pleasant, helpful and very upbeat. Our travel agent, Karol Fletcher with Fairmont Travel in Houston Texas, recommended this place to us and we were certainly not disappointed! Once we arrived, we made reservations at the restaurants, and booked an excursion to Xel-Ha. Our return transportation was also arranged. I state this to say that each of the villas has it's own concierge. We were blessed to have Yannis as ours. Once all was done, she did an amazing job.

It was our 3rd stay at Hideaway. Food, staff, room excellent but the towel game to get a lounge chair by the pool was ridiculous. At 6am there were at most 4 loungers left by the pool and guests would try and steal loungers. The hotel would also reserve loungers in the best areas for "special" guests which did not sit well given this resort is not on the lower end of the budget. For this reason, rating was 4 instead of 5. On to the good-beds were very comfortable and room very clean. Other than Ventanas, every meal was excellent. Shout out to Axel and Brian from the entertainment team-did a great job ! Also thanks to Ismael at the Palazzo restaurant-best waiter ! Would we go back? Perhaps but right now the memories of the towel game are too fresh.