Let me start this off by saying that I'm not a complainer. I have travelled quite a bit, particularly to Mexico. I know what to expect on a vacation like this. My wife and I have a young family, kids aged 3 and 6 and needed a break so booked a last minute trip to the Grand Oasis Palm in Cancun.
I'll start by saying, I should have read the reviews more carefully, as I can echo some of the sentiments in the more recent reviews. Even still, with a 4.0 out of 5 on trip advisor, I expected more, much more.
We were unable to spend any time in the pool, even on the hottest day, as the pool was absolutely freezing. I say this as a Canadian who can certainly handle the cold. There would be the odd person that would jump in, but they were out within seconds. Disappointing to say the least, as this is what my kids looked most forward to.
The sand on the beach was nice, but be warned, you need to get out to the chairs early, if you want a spot. I was there between 7 and 8 am most days to get a spot and at that point over 60% of the chairs were already taken. The ocean water was lovely and I did see them raking the beach in the mornings as well. However, when building sand castles with my kids, twice we noticed human feces wash ashore. This is quite obviously not the hotel intentionally doing it, but I'm sure boats are dumping near the inlet and it washes directly onto the beach.
The food at the buffet was awful. My wife is celiac and she was forced to live on eggs and fruit, due to 2 different gluten cross contamination incidents. The restaurants were okay, but the gluten free offerings were next to nothing. The lines to get into the buffet at peak times were upwards of an hour... so don't sleep in! We even had one morning where we arrived at 9:30 and were waiting to get into the "Bits and bites" buffet. It closes at 11, so we figured we had lots of time. We waited for approximately 40 mins before a staff member came up to us and said that we would not make the cut off for service and were asked to go to the main buffet, where the line was another hour long.
We paid for an upgraded room with a pool and ocean view. The view was pretty good, the rooms were dated, but average overall. This was not a disappointment as we don't spend much time in the room, other than to sleep. The issue was that the music would go on until midnight at the earliest and I'm sure the windows were single pane glass, which made it incredibly loud in our room. We ended up needing to downgrade the room to get to the backside of the hotel, which we were grateful for. The noise was less there and the kids could finally get to sleep.
Also... you can't flush toilet paper here, so be warned. All toiler paper goes into the garbage bin next to the toilet. Our kids did not understand at first, so we had a couple of incidents. I also feel that the resort may be understaffed with cleaners, as we had the door hanger on our door every day, mainly to remove the trash next to toilet, but they only came on two of the 8 days. First world problems, I know.
There is one thing that I didn't want to mention in this review, as it could have potentially been a number of coincidences, but I wanted to give a full review for people looking to book in the future. The majority of the guests are Spanish speaking, my family are not even though we try our best and always try to use manners in conversation. The bar, buffet and burger/hot dog stand lines are long and it seemed to me that several times as I, the gringo, would get to the front of the line, the attendant would stop service to go wash cups or have something else to do, after watching up to 10 people be served non-stop prior to me. I tipped, used manners and made my best attempt to make requests in Spanish, but this happened to me several times throughout our vacation. Call it a coincidence if you like.
I've never written a negative review about any resort or place of business in the past, so this speaks volumes to me. This has been long winded but to summarize, pay the extra money and go to another place where you can flush your toilet paper...