Ventus at Marina El Cid Spa and Beach Resort

This is a lovely timeshare. We come with friends and family. Wonderful employees. Clean. 9 restaurants. Good food. If you are lucky enough to get Luis as a butler you will be well cared for.

So far, I’m unimpressed. Sure, the pools are pretty and everything is clean and decently appointed, but there is surely nothing here to make me want to invest $150,000 in their vacation club!!! They brag about butlers and a personal concierge, blah, blah, blah, but I’d rather have enough storage space in my room to put my clothes away!!!!!! As it is, my clothes are in the closet in the bedroom, but I had to put my husband’s clothes in the closet in the living room!!!! They are both small and the closet in our room is made smaller by the iron hanging on one wall and the ironing board hanging on the other. Moreover, there are only three small drawers in our room, all of which went for my husband’s folded clothing, like underwear and socks and swim wear! My folded clothes had to go on a shelf (which I hope was properly dusted beforehand) in the closet that holds the safe and mini fridge.

Second, despite being on the “premium” plan, they still want a whopping $60 per day PER DEVICE for WiFi!!!! Are you kidding me?!! My husband works remotely and has to work while we’re here. This cost is ridiculous!!! Your all inclusive plan includes everything except WiFi??? We can use a kayak but not the internet?!! That alone is enough to send us back to Vidanta-where there is also plenty of closet and drawer space!

Third, don’t look at the resort’s pics of the beach. There’s no beach! Just the wall of the infinity pool where the surf crashes against it and a bunch of barricades out in the water to cut back on erosion. These barricades are pictured on google earth and have been there for at least two years!!!! Nevertheless, the images on the website show an expanse of impeded blue that runs freely on a sparkling white beach. Can you spell false advertising? I can.

And…let me know ignore the incredible lack of outlets in the living area of the room. We had move the dining table up against the kitchen bar so that my husband could plug in his computer on the bar wall. It was that or the bathroom!!!! Because that tiny little table in our bedroom is certainly insufficient for use as a desk! How hard would it have been to put some outlets in the living room?

Finally, so far…( these are my INITIAL impressions), this place needs some insulation between the walls!!!! If you’ve ever stayed at El Cid in Mazatlan, these rooms are pretty much the same footprint and every bit as loud!!! Boy I pity the people on the lower floors!!! Our first night here, there was a fight in the corridor either on our floor or one floor above, and because of the incredible echo, it sounded like it was in our living room! Then, this, our first morning here, we were awakened by a herd of bipeds running back and forth on our ceiling!

All this to say, they have NOT made a good impression!!!! We got a good deal and will certainly remain for the duration of our stay, but I’ve not seen anything yet that would entice me to return on another visit. I will go back to Vidanta.

This will be fairly long…we have just completed a two week stay, and it is highly likely that we will not ever do a repeat. This is not a simple thing to explain, so bear with me.

1. Accommodations: they’re fine. It’s nothing plush, and that’s fine. Just understand that. Our initial reaction was, “oh wow.” But after two weeks here, I can say it’s just about like most time share rooms. We had a two bedroom, and it was huge, at least most of it. The living room area is ridiculously large; it’s just completely unnecessary!! Half the room has no furniture! And what furniture there is , is exceedingly uncomfortable. We barely sat on either sofa the entire stay, and every time I sat at the dining table, I sat on a pillow. That’s how hard the chairs were. As for the size, it would have been really nice if the second bedroom had been a bit bigger. It had two double beds, which is just stupid. The beds were not big enough to sleep together, so my husband and I slept separately the entire time. The only chairs in the room were dining chairs, which as I stated were incredibly hard!! Moreover, there was no space to move them anywhere for, say, like watching tv. So if we were in our room, we were in our beds. This was just a poor situation. It also took about ten minutes for the shower water to get hot. What an incredible waste of water! The closet is not big enough, and there aren’t enough drawers to put things away.

2. The grounds: the grounds are lovely and the pools are nice. And there are many of them if you want to walk to one of the sister resorts. The water could definitely be cooler, though, so I definitely recommend against the infinity pool. The coolest pool is the rooftop pool at Ventus HA.

The beach is nonexistent. DO NOT believe the pictures on the website. They DO NOT represent reality!! Erosion has destroyed the beaches, and the water is just gross. You WILL NOT want to get in the water!!

The golf cart system works reasonably well. If you don’t want to walk from resort to resort, you can get a ride pretty quick…that is…up until about 9:30. And since they’re giving out 9:30 dinner reservations (more on that later), you might still need one as late as 10:00 or 10:30.

3. Food, Dolores and Aroma: zero complaints. In fact this was the best place to eat on the resort property. It is a food court that provides Mexican food, Italian, and Asian food and it varies a bit each day, although just a bit. Still, between all the stations, your lunch will be enjoyable every day! Moreover, if you want a dessert or pastry, come here. As it is connected to Aroma, the coffee shop, you will find the very best desserts here! The cheesecake was as good, if not better, than anywhere I’ve ever had cheesecake! Delicious!

4. Food: the restaurants and the buffet. The buffet is good, particularly for breakfast. For dinner, it’s fine for one or maybe two of your meals, but no more because there’s almost no change to the menu, and sometimes it feels like they’re serving leftovers from Dolores’ lunch menu.

The restaurants are just NOT GOOD! For one, getting a decent reservation was just impossible!!! Maybe we were targeted because we booked through Interval or refused to do the timeshare presentation, but in two weeks here, we NEVER had a reservation before 8:30, and that only happened once!!! The rest of our reservations were either for 9:00 or 9:30!!!

When we ate at the Italian restaurant, the servers were literally packing up the salad bar while I was trying to make a salad!! Needless to say, my salad was missing most of the ingredients I had planned on adding! Moreover, the serving size of the entrees were so small!! The lasagna was a three inch square! And it came with nothing on the side! I actually ordered a second entree to split with my husband. It was good, but it was the only thing in the menu that even interested us.

When we finally got a reservation for Hacienda Arracife, it was for 9:30! All the info for the restaurant online said it closed at 9:30. We actually showed up at 9:00 to a half empty restaurant and they at least seated us early. I did not enjoy the food at all here; although my son enjoyed the burrito and my husband, the fajitas. The drinks we ordered were not good unless you happened to get a margarita. The desserts were a hit or a miss.

The marina restaurant which is the seafood restaurant, was awful. My fillet was a folded sirloin steak, and when my husband asked our server to recommend the best thing on the menu, he suggested the fried shrimp! At a seafood restaurant!!!!

The restaurants are also weird in that everything on the menus are meant for individual servings, including appetizers. Please note: appetizers are not really shareable. So if all of you want fundido, you all need to order it! Also, they require that you order everything at the same time: your soup, your salad, your appetizer, your entree, and your dessert. It was just odd. And when you have a 9:00 or 9:30 reservation, don’t be surprised when they’re out of the items you’d like to have.

The dinners were just so very disappointing. Several times, we decided we would rather pay a hundred bucks for a taxi and eat in town, an expense we should not have had to add to our all inclusive expense.

5. Internet: is non existent unless you pay for it. They want sixty bucks per device per week. For all of us, for two weeks, that would have been an additional 500 bucks!! Everywhere we went in their area we had free WiFi, but not here!!!! My husband works remotely. We had to figure out a better way to get internet, and we did. It was just NOT OK that all inclusive actually means, “well not entirely all inclusive.”

6. Service: all of the staff was great with the exception of one restaurant server who left us mid order and never returned. We soon had a different waiter and never knew why. Other than that, staff is great. It was, however, aggravating to know our rooms were supposed to be supplied with umbrellas, robes, slippers, etc. but you had to request all of them! Since we were out of our room most of the time and had opted out of daily maid service, we were never able to get any of these items. For crying out loud! If you say these things are provided, put them in the rooms before check in like every other hotel resort!!!

7. Would we come back? I don’t think so. What you pay for when you book here is the all inclusive, and it just wasn’t worth it. Between unavailability at the restaurants, the fact that restaurants were closed due to the time of year, the fact that we were not able to get decent times for reservations, and the fact that the food just wasn’t that great, I’d rather spend my money elsewhere.

I just don’t feel like they’ve quite got their act together here. We’ve just stayed too many other places that were superior. Sometimes, a really good deal is just not that great of a deal. That seems to sum up our experience here.