We spent May 18-23 at Desire. It was our second trip to Desire in Cancun and our third Desire experience overall, having been to Desire Cabo once as well. Our previous trip to Desire Cancun was just this past September ’09. It’s strange to find ourselves writing anything other than a perfectly glowing report of our trip because we really do love the place. However, we have to admit we’re glad that this particular visit wasn’t our first. If it had been, we may have decided not to give it a second try and would have missed out on a truly special place.
To start with the good stuff, the retiled jacuzzi is wonderful. No more scraped-up thighs from broken and uneven tiles. Water temperature seemed well-controlled, too, not too hot in the afternoon and not too cold at night.
The remodeled disco is also fantastic. Very modern decor with ample seating at the bar and beds around the perimeter of the room. The new dance floor is still a little bit small to really dance much unless you are the only couple up there but it’s definitely nicer than it was before. The DJ also still seemed to have a pretty limited playlist, repeated night after night, consisting mostly of top 40 songs from about 2 or 3 years ago. If you’re there for more than two nights, the repetition gets a little old. That said, we still had a nice time there.
We never used the old playroom but did peek at it last time and the new one is much nicer. All the beds were pretty consistently occupied while the disco was open as far as we could tell. We did not witness anyone using the swing and were not adventurous enough to try it ourselves!
The food is good, especially for an all-inclusive. Can’t say I’d make a special trip to a restaurant at home for it if that’s what they served but it was definitely quite edible. Our favorite was the white restaurant (still can’t remember what they call the place) with Suki being second. The buffet always has something decent as well. We are wine drinkers and we have to say that they still have a couple of pretty lousy house wines as the only options without paying extra. Of course we drank them anyways. (We had already blown the budget just paying the nightly rate and the airfare so we weren’t about to pay extra for drinks). Seems like if they can serve liquor drinkers some of the top shelf stuff, they could find better house wines, or at least provide a couple of additional choices.
Service was excellent, especially from the waiters and bartenders. They go out of their way to help you. We especially appreciated that they didn’t make fun of our terrible attempts to speak Spanish (at least not to our faces). There was a brief attempt at check-in to sell us on the premier membership thing but after saying no a few times they left us alone the rest of the trip.
The grounds are beautiful and spotless and the lobby bar is especially pretty at night.
Now for the slightly more negative stuff. We did get a bit peeved about the pool chair situation. Supposedly everyone who wants a chair for the day can show up at 7:30 a.m. to start reserving them. Note: The hotel brochure you are given at check-in lists an incorrect later time, which led us to miss out on chairs our first morning there. The following days, even though we got there right at 7:30, we were told on at least a couple of mornings, all the pool chairs were “already taken.â€