I’ve got lots of fun & beautiful Puerto Rico posts coming up, but I wanted to get my hotel review out of the way first. I’ll start off by saying we only booked this trip about a week in advance & were using hotel points, so we were very limited on our choices and just decided to go with Embassy Suites Dorado del Mar outside of San Juan. We figured we’d be driving around the island & it would be nice to have breakfast & evening cocktails included in a room with at least a mini-fridge.
Like a typical Embassy suites, the rooms are arranged around an interior atrium that was all decorated for Christmas. The area where the hotel is located has a casino across the street, a golf course, a swanky spa & an entire condominium gated community.
Of our 5 nights, we only ended up having drinks 2 nights & eating breakfast one day, so that was kind of a waste. The happy hour was great- a decent drink choice & a few snacks, but there was no nice restaurant on the property. We ate in the hotel restaurant our first night & they had a very limited, simple menu. We walked across the street to the golf course club house & ate at the sushi/hibachi grill two nights.
How we spent Christmas evening- double drinks, self-portraits & festive colors!
The rooms themselves were pretty typical for an Embassy Suites, but they were older & most of the furniture/decor/paint looked fairly old and worn down. I know it’s especially difficult to keep thing nice, clean and new in a tropical environment, but the interior really needed some updating. We were lucky enough to score a room looking out towards the water & the wing off to the left of the hotel is not hotel, but maybe condos?
The nicest part of the hotel was by far the pool area, which had great landscaping & a very large pool area.
We never actually hung out at the pool- walked by it the first night & then again on our way out since we were gone everyday out exploring the island.
They do have a nice poolside bar & snack shack which is a great perk.
The pool was really beautiful & they had people in the hot tub all the time.
This hotel is really great for families that just want to stay in one place without exploring or going into San Juan. They have a shallow pool area & a playground for the kids.
The beach itself was a little under-whelming. I’m not sure why you’d put a hotel all the way out in Dorado unless you had fabulous beaches. Maybe they just needed the room for the golf course? They provided some chairs, paddle boats & kayaks to explore the protected little lagoon area.
We walked down to the end & around the corner to see the waves and look down the coastline. The other in convenient thing about the hotel is that there really aren’t many food options nearby. There are several fast food places & drug stores just outside the main gate, but you have to go over 13 speed bumps to even get out of the gated community. We didn’t check out the casino, but it was supposedly brand new. Can’t complain too much about the hotel since most of my problems were due to our lack of planning, but just thought I’d review it anyway.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Headed to Austin today for work & back this afternoon.
holy cow, that is BEAUTIFUL!!!
Thanks! Unfortunately, we were never there- too busy checking out the rest of the island