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allinclusivegal
all-inclusive resorts in cancun and the riviera maya
Looking for Finest Playa Mujeres information? Check out this link under the New Resorts section.
Here is my review for Finest Playa Mujeres. They have service issues they need to fix. The resort facilities are great. Trip Advisor has some weird 1,500 character limits
Top 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Host a Wedding or Group Event at Finest
There is great irony in this review. I just came back from our stay at the Finest Playa Mujeres and the facilities are well maintained and the service of the staff on the beach was great. Paola Ortega did a great job of executing the large group evening dinner and event. My guests enjoyed their stay, thought the food was above average, were just a little bit annoyed by the randomness of nightly dinner reservations (you wait in line at 5:45PM and sometimes could eat at 6PM and other times get told to come back at 8PM) However, the level of customer service with the event planning team and the reservations team was so poor that I will never recommend the Finest Playa Mujeres to anyone planning a group event. Note – we had 40 people and were spending a week – spending about $60,000 and I have stayed in about 20 other resort properties over the years. I had another old Trip Advisor profile, but no longer have that email address and can’t access it.
Here are the top 5 reasons:
1) The event organizer, Ariana Palestino, was non-responsive and unprofessional.
I emailed her on Jan. 4th asking to make sure that she could reserve some space for 2 group dinners. She emailed back on Jan. 8th with an updated guest list, but did not answer my question about dinner, so I immediately emailed her back again on Jan.8th. She did not reply until Feb. 17th and asked for a headcount. I responded immediately on Feb. 17th with our headcount and asked for the options for the group dinners. I did not get a response, so I followed up on Feb. 22, as well as an email in March, April, and May 20th. Each time, asking if she is getting my emails because I want to finalize our plans. On May 27th, 100 DAYS after her last email, she responds and says “Thank you for your patience and understanding, we have started our high events season and we have limited access to our email”. 100 DAYS of NO RESPONSE. Are you kidding me? This is one of the most unprofessional people I have dealt with. I am so furious that I just decide to wait until the Fall because clearly, Ariana is not able to plan anything in advance. I email my dinner event choices on Sept 21 – no response. I email again Oct. 10 – no response. I have to resort to having my sister, who speaks fluent Spanish, call the resort. But when she asks for Ariana, they just keep saying she is not there. She eventually connects with Paola a few weeks before our event. We thought they fired Ariana. Nope, it turns out she was promoted!
2) They aggressively cancel your reservations 1 month in advance and there is limited customer support to help.
30 days before the reservation, many of my guests received a generic looking email that went to many people’s spam folders from Excellence – saying their credit card was not valid and stating that their room would be cancelled if they did not update their credit card within 24 hours. Many of my family members booked their room about 1 year in advance and so many of their card numbers had changed due to all of the constant security breaches and re-issuances of credit cards. In addition, I had other family members, whose US banks (like Chase Bank) flag the Excellence account as being linked to fraud and put a hold on the charge until the user called in to confirm that it was a legit charge. Since Excellence resorts (which runs Finest) only allows for 24 hours to deal with this issue and does not call any of their guests – only sends 1 total email. I had a large number of guests have their rooms cancelled just 1 month ahead of the Thanksgiving stay. When they called the reservations number, they had to wait an average of 1 hour even get through and then many were told their room type was no longer available and they had to pay $800 or $1000 per night instead of the $600 rate with our group promo code. As a group we probably spent 20-30 hours with their central reservations office dealing with this issue and it cost us several thousand dollars more.
3) No one can make any changes to their reservation dates once you are 60 days prior to the event without cancelling their whole reservation and paying full price.
In the past, this probably was not a huge issue. However, nowadays airlines are canceling their flights and moving people just 6 weeks or 4 weeks in advance. We had several people get their flights cancelled and had to go from a Sunday to Sunday trip to a Saturday to Saturday trip. Same number of nights at the hotel, but due to the way the Finest does their group promo codes, they cannot make that change without cancelling your whole trip. The other crazy thing is that the group reservations department DOES NOT HAVE PHONE NUMBER! So you have to email them and then wait several days for a response. We found Nayarith Villareal to be unhelpful when the central reservations department made some errors.
4) There is no manager on site to help with your problems.
With all of the room reservations fiascos, we could not solve all the issues in advance and so then asked to speak to a manager when we arrived at the hotel. The nice front desk person said that the general manager Mr. Eric Cervantes was not “on site”. She REFUSED to provide his contact information, but said that I could contact Dalel Nasta, who has the email of “Public Relations”. I forward her the emails detailing the issues with Ariana, and with Nayarith and ask for assistance with one of my members who I personally called to switch her from a Sunday to Sunday reservations to a Saturday to Saturday prior to the 60 day time period and the reservations department did not process the change correctly, so she still had one more night than she needed and did not want to be charged for the extra night. Dalel did not respond on the room reservation issue for 2 days and then informed me that no one at the hotel could assist with the issue and suggested that I call the central reservations office and gave me a 1-800 number.
5) The airport transfer service does not reply or confirm when guests email them their flight information.
This one is relatively straight forward, but caused massive headaches for the organizer. When you book with a group, you do get free airport shuttle service, to and from the resort – which is a nice perk. Nayarith in the Group Reservation department told us that our guests “Can arrange their transfer directly through Seasons Tours at transfers@seasonstours.com” However, each of my guests emailed their flight information and NONE of them received an email response confirming that the Seasons Tours received their email and confirmed that they would be picked up. I had to email Nayarith repeatedly about this and then about 1 month before the trip, I was asked to make a giant spreadsheet with everyone’s flight information and individual room reservation codes. That was a huge pain for me. Every other resort seems to be able to individually confirm transportation with each individual guest. One small note, the email tells you to look for a Seasons rep wearing beige pants, green shirt, and white hat. None of the guys were wearing hats. They usually stand near 30 or 56/57. But the email confirmation just tells you to wander around looking for the guys in a sea of 300 people all trying to get your business. It is a messy situation.
Some other observations and tips about Finest – if you tip well ($20-40) at dinner or even at breakfast ($5) at Seaside restaurant, the waiters will often ask if you want to make a reservation for the next night at dinner. That is pretty valuable, because waiting in line for a random time at dinner is a waste of time – especially with kids. The hot tub by building #4 is the warmest on the property and is relatively private compared to most of the others. The “silent party” was one of the best events all week. They had a DJ and everyone gets headphones so they can listen to one of 3 stations and they had a guy on stilts who looked like a giant robot. Really fun. Beach and Pool chairs are always at a premium, so designate someone in the group to go down there around 7:00AM each day to reserve space for your group. They can then have breakfast at Dukes and get a great view of the beach in the morning.
Other odds and ends: The housekeeping accidently removed a kid’s stuffed animal (the only one they have slept with for 5+ years) from the room during cleaning and it was never seen again. They did not consider this a big issue and did not treat it as such. We had daughter with a nut allergy and prior to the waiter at the Mexican restaurant bringing out desserts, we reminded him of this. He brought several desserts to the table and we asked again if any of them had nuts. He said no. We then pointed to the almonds on the chocolate cake and asked him what they were. He said, “almonds”. When we then pointed out that almonds were nuts, he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. They make no effort to put your group in the same building – even if you book a year in advance. They said it was “too hard”. They also do not allow one person to pay for a large number of rooms. They originally said they could do 5 rooms on a card, but then said that was also “too hard”.
In short, Finest Playa Mujeres has a nice facility with good service for drinks on the beach (especially if you tip $5 every 2-3 trips). However, the group customer service is horrendous and caused so many extra hours of logistical headaches that I would never wish for anyone else to experience it. The lack of management on site or anywhere else means that your problems never get resolved. Their customer service representatives’ command of English is poor, which is odd since 80% of their customers seem to speak English as their primary, or second language (there were some Russians and Chinese). The 50-60 extra hours I had to spend dealing with the problems created by the Finest’s credit card cancellation policies, inflexibility of group booking codes, horrible call center experience, all guaranteed that I will never plan a group trip at any of the properties in the Excellence group.
Jordan: Thank you for taking the time to leave your extensive review of this Finest property on my blog. It does sound like a nightmare and I am sorry you had such a terrible experience in the planning of what I’m sure was to be a stellar vacation for everyone in your party. I did not know that about Chase bank, thanks for bringing that up in your review. Since I traveled to this resort as a couple back in 2015, I cannot comment personally about a group experience at this resort. Since it appears you have already talked to multiple individuals, I would recommend contacting the corporate office of the Excellence Collection which operates all Excellence resorts. Also, I have found that asking for info (like where to file a complaint) gets me quicker results if I leave a private message on any resort’s Facebook page. I hope you eventually get a satisfactory resolution to your travel issues.