Playa de San Martin

Before we arrived at the hotel, we received a form to fill out with all our details. A few days before our arrival, we were required to check in online to avoid waiting at the hotel. However, on the day of our arrival, we still had to wait about half an hour to check in again. In the meantime, I was browsing a shop in the hotel and accidentally dropped a magnet, which I had to pay for—it cost around 260 pesos. There was no elevator. While the view from our ocean-view room was nice, the room itself could have been cleaner. We managed, but the bedsheets were too thin, and we could see the mattress, which wasn’t very clean. There was no air conditioning, only a fan, which caused discomfort. The noise from the fan was unbearable—it hurt my ears and gave me a headache! I couldn’t sleep at all because of the noise, but when I turned it off, it was too hot. I ended up leaving it on for the entire week, and the temperature never went below 25°C. It was truly an unpleasant stay. The food was served in an open buffet. Since we don’t eat meat, it was disturbing to see that the same utensils were used for both meat and non-meat items. For example, they were cooking meat and then using the same spatula to serve pasta.

We weren't told about the construction, the elevator to our room wasn't working and we were on the 4th floor. The phone didn't work, the oom that we reserved had leaking a roof in the bathroom, we were locked inside the lobby elevator due to electricity issues. After waiting in the lobby for 4hrs and finally getting into our room, there was no running water. The food was not good and was served cold. We paid $100 for snorkeling photos and have not received them as of yet. This is our 3rd trip to Secrets and we were very disappointed. I feel that I deserve a credit at this point and will not be going again. Have a great day.

So we were debating between the beach access room and the reef view room. We are a couple with child and eventually we took the more expensive reef view. The room itself is big and luxurious and it is right in front of the reef with a ladder to a great snorkel. However we decided to downgrade to the beach access room a bit smaller but much closer to the pool to breakfast and to the kids club which worked better for us