Some backstory of how this trip came to be: The Westin Lagunamar is actually a time share property (the Westin has a separate hotel on the other end of the hotel district). I'm a Starwood Preferred Guest and have stayed at a lot of hotels through them for various trips. SPG runs promos to get their frequent members to visit timeshare properties for great deals in hopes of them falling in love with the place and wanting to buy one. Josh and I planned our wedding last year while we were still students. Taking a honeymoon was very important to me, but we were on a limited budget. When a deal came up for a Westin hotel in Cancun for 5 days and 4 nights for $349 (TOTAL!) we jumped on it. Even though it's a timeshare it's the exact same experience as staying at a Westin hotel. The service and standards are the same and you don't have to listen to a timeshare pitch unless you want to. We traded 90 minutes of our time for $175 to use towards our trip to XCaret to swim in the cenotes and explore the Mayan ruins. I'll recap that another day but it was amazing and one of the highlights of the trip.
We loved our room:
Word to the wise: do not try and drunkenly operate a bathtub with jets. I tried to make myself a bubble bath after a few too many buy one get one Long Islands at the pool's happy hour and turned on the jets when the tub was still filling. I found the ensuing waterworks hilarious. Josh was not amused when he came in to see I had turned the bathroom into a giant slip and slide.
If I could take one souvenir home from the trip it would be this shower. It was heaven.
The view from our balcony was beautiful:
And we were seconds from the beach:
There were so many fun little areas to relax around the property:
Josh took a million pictures of iguanas he spotted on our trip. This one was sunning itself on the resort's mini golf course.
There was a swim up bar! It was a fun way to get to meet people.
I loved this random large chess set we found.
There was also lots of kid areas and Mayan ruins that we somehow never managed to find. We saw some amazing ones at XCaret though so we didn't mind. Directly across the street from the hotel is the high-end shopping mall La Isla. It was beautiful and fun to walk around but most designer goods are out of my price range, unless I'm buying them second hand. Add on the 40% markup over American prices and I found myself sticking to window shopping. There's also a great workout facility on premise that I didn't use once. My cough came back right before we left for our honeymoon so I just wanted to focus on all the fun things we'd be doing and not make it worse. We both love to explore places when we vacation and did a ton of walking and swimming. I'm calling it good.
The hotel arranges daily activities with the fun team. I felt like I was at the resort in Dirty Dancing. We went to the tequila tasting with a big group from the hotel that was a lot of fun. We learned a lot about how tequila is made and got to sample drinks that are only available in Mexico.
The hotel has three restaurants on premise. We had breakfast every morning at Oceana and enjoyed the gorgeous views:
We could not have picked a better place to stay for our honeymoon. Everyone was so nice and friendly. The hotel felt completely safe and all the water is purified on premise so you can drink the water, brush your teeth, and have ice in your drinks without having to worry. We'd love to stay there again but due to being invited through a special promotion and us not being timeshare people we probably won't. We did have dinner twice at the Ritz Carlton just down the street and thought that would be a great place for a future trip back to Cancun. Too bad the nightly rate there is more than what we paid for four nights at Lagunamar. ;p
Questions of the Day: Are you a Westin fan? Have you been to Cancun? Where did you stay? Did you like it?
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