TripAdvisor Traveler Rating

The hotel is beautiful, the location is great and the rooms are fantastic. The bad part was the food, they need to improved, no 24 hr food, no bars open and food quality really bad. Something that I was furious about was the male staff at the restaurants asking for tips, they were rude, I also have to mention that female staff were very kind. The humidity and heat are very strong ; it’s unbearable to have breakfast sweating because they don’t have A/C in the restaurant or in the common areas.

**Overview** We visited the Occidental Cozumel (August 10–14) to celebrate our 25th anniversary, having honeymooned on the island. We previously stayed at their Occidental Xcaret property and expected similar high standards, but this resort fell completely short. While they provided a nice anniversary dessert, the wine included with our concierge-level room was never delivered. **The Verdict:** We would gladly return to the Xcaret property, but we will absolutely not return to Occidental Cozumel. **The Positives** * **The Staff:** Overall pleasant and welcoming. * **The Grounds:** Beautiful and well-maintained. * **Housekeeping:** Did an amazing job keeping the rooms clean. * **The Spa:** Pricey, but our couples massage was one of the best we’ve ever had at a resort. **The Mixed / In-Between** * **The Beach:** The water was crystal clear on our first day—the best we've seen in the Caribbean. However, a storm then brought in a large amount of sargassum seaweed. The resort made no attempt to clean it up for two days. This left the main pool as the only place to swim, since the adults-only pool was closed so they could remove a tree. * **Dining & Reservations:** Since we only stayed 4 nights, we were limited to 2 specialty restaurants. The Italian and Mexican restaurants were good. However, we were denied a reservation for the seafood restaurant because it was supposedly "closed," yet we saw people dining there that day. * **The Buffet:** Very basic, offered little day-to-day variety, and the food was just average. **The Negatives (Needs Work)** * **Misleading Amenities:** The website advertises "4 swimming pools" and "exclusive options for adults." In reality, the pools consist of: 1 main pool, 1 kids' club pool, 1 royalty-level pool, and 1 adults-only pool (which, as mentioned, was closed for tree removal almost our entire stay). The only "exclusive" adult activities were an adult nightclub and banning kids from water volleyball. * **Lackluster Entertainment:** Daytime activities were highly repetitive (water/beach volleyball, water aerobics), with a basic bartending lesson added later. Nighttime entertainment was incredibly minimal (a guitar duet, karaoke, mariachi) until they finally put on a real show on Friday night. * **Poor Room Maintenance:** The rooms are nicely furnished, but repairs are sloppy. A broken dresser drawer was "fixed" by screwing a stick to the front as a handle. Furthermore, loose paint was never scraped before the A/C registers were painted, resulting in paint chips constantly blowing onto our belongings. * **Loud A/C:** It cooled the room well, but it was so loud it sounded like a high-volume white noise machine. * **Plumbing Issues:** Like much of Mexico, you cannot flush toilet paper here, which is often not the case at high-end resorts. The toilet struggled to flush a single square of paper. Worse, there was zero signage explaining this rule, and it took 3 or 4 trips to the front desk before staff casually mentioned that paper needed to go in the trash can.

Our trip here was phenomenal. I am mainly writing this review for pro dive to give our dive master Louisa a great review. She was friendly very observant of everybody diving with her. You can tell she truly enjoys what she does on a everyday basis.

Stay 15 days - Royal Level. Used La Carreta restaurant for the duration with a few exceptions. Rooms are big, clean and beautiful. TV was not much of an use as the viewing and sound quality are very bad. for us was ok because we don't watch tv much but would have been nice to have it once in a while. The staff is one of the important reasons we go to Cozumel Occidental. La Carreta restaurant staff is particularly kind and very professional. Lupita, Carlos Uch, Juan-Carlos and David the captains. Claudia and Armando. Jimmy - the best chef you have at royal level. They all are very hard working people, friendly and very attentive to our needs; they make our stay super special. Then there is Noemi - she is one of your best employees and we are very happy to see her hard work, professionalism and dedication being recognized - she deserves it!. Please make sure you keep this very very good people at the royal level, because it matters a lot. Amazing improvement - now Occidental has the best beach in Cozumel! However, please make sure the chairs are washed as there were a lot of them full of mold. There is a very very hard working guy Jesus Frias, he does his best but one person to care for all the chairs is not possible... Buy new ones as the ones you have are old - Allegro has better chairs and towels too. I love the no card towels but for that to work, you need to double the numbers of towels you have. Many times we went there were no towels available. Food was very good, tasty and cooked properly. I would suggest once a year to change an item on the menu, this way in a few years there would be a new entire menu. Jimmy is a very very good chef.

We chose Occidental to get open water dive certified knowing about the limited food options and booked an additional 4 days (we probably should have split the stay over 2 resorts rather than 8 days in one). We were planning to walk to Alberto's just south on the beach but the beach had eroded to the point where walking wasn't possible so we ended up overpaying for 2 cab rides for 1/2 mile. The road is scary and we were going for sunset. Staff service was generally good but inconsistent. Sometimes very helpful and friendly other times just getting their job done. The grounds were a beautiful mix of manicured and raw jungle. The AC in the rooms generally worked really well and we slept well. The AC in the breakfast/dinner buffet space was non-existent/broken/inadequate. Mexican restaurant AC was the same. The mediterranean restaurant was good. Generally we were happy with buffets but they get old and you have limited ability to reserve restaurants based on number of nights of your stay. Restaurants were generally not good (stay away from anything with squid it's almost inedible with how chewy it is). The Mediterranean restaurant was pretty good (and had AC) but the mexican and ocean view restaurants were on par with the buffet. The dive center was great. It was our first time diving and we really felt taken care of. Our instructor Luisa was a gem! Generally we had a great time. It would take a lot for us to come back to a resort as we like experiencing new things so we probably wouldn't come back before trying some of the other dive capable resorts in Cozumel but would recommend the resort especially for someone coming to get dive certification(s).