shore128 wrote:I'll admit to being the one that started the post with a very factual summary of the press release.
Shore128 - the irony of the whole TA thing is that one of the destination experts who replies about matters related to PM is Puerto Morelos Frank - he and his wife(before she passed away) had been a well known long time Lifestyle couple. We met them many years ago at the old Caribbean Reef Club (a LS friendly small resort just south of PM - now closed) long before Desire RM opened and when his wife became terminally ill they decided to just pick up and move permanently to the PM area where they had enjoyed life so much.
Cieba and most other resorts on the Yucatan where sent staggering by the travel fall out from 9/11 and then backhanded from the '09 Swine Flue scare.
Without deep pockets and the marketing/discount capability of the large multi property chain resorts, the writing has been on the wall for all small (100 room) resorts.
IMHO Cieba's decision to go with up to 12 "Lifestyle" takeover weeks per year actually hurt them more than helped them. Regular "vanilla" customers started to consider other resorts rather than have to plan their vacations around the possibility of the time that they wanted being a takeover week.
Also the groups that booked these takeover weeks had to spend extra to provide on site entertainment, temporary playroom and extra security.
The rational look at it comes out this way
- based upon the low occupancy since '09 - the tourist benefit to PM from Cieba customers is negligible
- if anything the Cieba property being managed/run by Desire will probably result in a more of a long term "good neighbor" policy than Cieba could manage during takeover weeks when really the the resort was run almost completely by the takeover group.
Cieba financially was IMHO, probably on it's last legs. There were, in best case, only two options available to their management at that point:
- sell the property for a substantial loss to another owner(probably a large resort chain) that would just bulldoze the place and throw up a large new multistory resort right on the edge of quaint little PM - would have loved to hear the comments on TA about that one - lol
- contract the management of Cieba to one of two competing groups, both LS friendly, Original Resorts - locally owned and a good history of profitable resort management and a consortium of LS Travel Agents(the same ones that booked the Cieba LS weeks) with no history of resort management - I think you can all see why Original Resorts came out the winner
Please use the forum links to book directly with Desire RM, Desire Pearl or the Desire Cruises.
This will help keep the forums economically self sustaining and Ad free for all to use.