Staycation in Cancún, México

Our family went on their first points-fueled trip: a week-long hotel staycation at Hyatt Ziva Cancun. Originally we decided to not join this trip, as we didn’t have nearly enough UR points, and going to a tourist-exclusive hotel staycation was not high on our traveling wishlist. But after we got two Hilton Free Night Awards last year, we thought maybe a way to use the Hilton FNAs could be to combine them with a short stay at the Hyatt for an extended weekend trip that overlaps with family’s. By then, Hyatt had increased its points cost by 50%, and the Hilton FNA didn’t work as we hoped, but we made it work and took the trip.

Hyatt Ziva

We stayed Friday-Sunday at Hyatt. It was a nice, relaxing stay. Good unlimited food, floating by the beach or pool, naps. The pool was not nearly as overrun by screaming children as WA Monarch Beach, although they also had slightly annoying upbeat heavy bass music running through most of the day. The pool and hot tub hours are only 8am-8pm. Why.. why? What else are we going to do into the evening if not chilling in the water?

Gotta be a bit selective with the choice of in-hotel restaurants. The Mercado bufffet food was mediocre, but the Italian restaurant and Steakhouse were excellent. I read that the French restaurant is the best.

Random, but they have a trained falcon in-house to scare away the birds from the area. During the morning breakfast we set up shop in the outdoor table and left to go get more food, and when we came back birds were feasting on the food.

There are two beaches immediately accessible from the hotel – the tiny northern one where security seems to restrict access to hotel guests only, and the bigger eastern beach that is more public. The eastern beach was excellent. It extends at 3 feet of depth for a good 100+ feet from the shore, so it’s easy for families and children to play there without fear of drowning or any injuries. Sand at both are pristine white and the water is very clear. We spent a dozen hours on our floaters in the ocean, just lying down with the floaties. The transition from either beach into the hotel was seamless. Just emerge out of the water, walk to the hotel, and wash at the hotel’s outdoor shower, and then you are ready to go into the pool go into the rooms. There were no roads to cross to get to the beach.

Two people from our family group really wanted to try the Dolphin experience, so they plus three children signed up for the 30-minute “Ride” package. Our sister-in-law did some haggling and managed to price it at $430 for the experience plus $140 for all the photos for the 2 adults and 3 children. They have dedicated photographers stationed in front of the group and take 200 photos over the course of the experience, which they try to sell at an additional price. The haggling is pretty open-ended – it’s whatever you can manage to talk them into and what they feel they can sell it to you. If they feel tickets are not selling well, they are more pliable to discounts, etc. They are a separate company from Hyatt with multiple locations along the Yucatán (this location is housed within the hotel), so I think the payment cannot be a room charge.

Waldorf Astoria

We then moved to the Hilton Waldorf Astoria Cancun Sunday-Tuesday. Getting to the hotel was a mix of scary and impressive. First, there’s an imposing 200-feet wide stone wall security gate, with a roman-style stone pavement that forces the car slow down and vibrate along. Then there’s 3 miles of an elevated 1.5-lane road running over a mangrove swamp extending as far as the eye can see, with warning signs “watch out for crocodiles”, “please do not disturb the animals” (with a monkey icon) and speed bumps, then the bifurcation between the Hilton All-Inclusive hotel and Waldorf Astoria hotel followed by another security gate, leading into the deserted hotel entrance loop.

Our Uber driver at first went into the vendors gate, and at both security gates we spent 5 minutes with the security staff saying that they didn’t see us in the guest list, until we finally realized that they were looking at the All-Inclusive list, and not WA’s.

The hotel is super secluded and after the 15 minute ride over the swamp, we were not even daring to try to venture outside the gates. We just spent our entire stay by the pool and eating in the hotel. Apparently there are some restaurants inside the gate, but I never verified whether those are restaurants belonging to the All-Inclusive or whether they were independent ones.

I already knew this but the beach by this hotel has brown water, is rough to walk around, and is all-around not an inviting environment. You can rent kayaks (I think) and paddleboards at the hotel for $5 USD cash, but we ended up not doing it for lack of change.

We spent our entire time by the pool. The pool water felt too lukewarm for comfort on the first day, but by the second day we acclimatated and it felt nicer. Half of the pool area has a unique 1-foot deep design, and the other half is 4 feet deep. This design probably contibues to the pool heating up very easily. The pool hours here are also 8am-8pm. Half of guests were in the recliners and cabanas reading books. There are two pools here next to each other – one to the front of the beach overlooking the sea, and the other one covered by the trees. The cabanas by the second pool are free first-come first-serve, while the cabanas by the first pool require a drinks package purchase.

The hotel was extremely quiet, added to the fact that this was supposedly an off-peak season according to our waiter (the steakhouse was closed for this reason, he said), and I counted about 30 guests. The few children kept pretty quiet throughout the day. There was some soft new-age music playing by the poolside bar, and the area was overrun by birds flying the area. All in all, the hotel feels good for a meditation retreat.

As usual, hotel food was extremely expensive, although a tad cheaper than WA Monarch Beach. Compared to Monarch Beach, the food was pretty good with excellent presentation.

Unfortunately by Sunday evening my wife started to feel under the weather, and spent most of our stay coughing and with muscle aches. I was fine. We asked for a Covid test kit but the hotel didn’t have one – they offered to take her to the hospital in Cancun, but it was late by then and we decided to soldier on. When we came back to LA and ran a test, we both tested positive, which is not great.. I have so much work to get back to.

We finally got a proper upgrade to a suite after staying at 3 hotels in Europe and 1 WA in Orange County with the Aspire Diamond. I think having so much room space to walk around, and 2 showers and 2 bathrooms made dealing with wife’s illness easier. The suite had an outdoor balcony stone bathtub.

Flight

Booking the flight here on points was.. just okay. United flies LAX-CUN three times a day, and we found saver economy rates at $180 cash or 8.5k+$45 each way ten months in advance. I don’t remember what the first class award rates were, but if we go again in the future I might definitely look into that. It’s a tiny, worn down airplane that flies full each way.

We tried to do the trick of selecting seats A and C and hope no one books the middle. It didn’t work as the flight was fully booked. The flight seemed relatively empty until the day before, and then suddenly every seat would fill up and I could see people playing musical chairs all the way to the hour before departure. We flew 36A and 36C with a random person in between us one way, which was very uncomfortable. I leaned to the left to give the most space to the middle passenger and avoid touching their arms, but it was twisting my spines. On the return, I booked us on 39D 39F, the one right in front of the bathroom, hoping no one would choose the uncomfortable middle 39E. But someone did. And I saw 31D 31E open up, so moved us to those two instead of being stuck in the same situation. And then, an hour later, after some musical chairs, I noticed two people picked 39D 39F. That 39E seat ended up being the sole empty chair in the entire airplane. How do people pull this off? 31D 31E was alright, I sat in the middle and I was actually okay as I was able to sit upright throughout the flight.

I had no idea that the airline industry had moved in the direction of not providing any substantive food on long-range domestic flights. It’s a 5 hour flight from LAX to Cancun (10am-3pm in our case), and all we got was a drink and a bag of peanuts. Crazy!

In LAX, I got a free United Club pass from u/Laande (Thank you!) and bought another for $25 from r/churningmarketplace. CUN airport was tough. There’s no water fountain. (Of course, people don’t drink tap water here, I forgot about that.) And the Cancun airport restaurants were a) almost as expensive as WA Cancun and b) mediocre tasting. Water bottles were being sold at $5 USD. We don’t have a Plaza Premium pass but in retrospect maybe we should have paid the $40-$45 per person to enter the T3 Mera Business Lounge. We would have had average food, sit comfortably, have access to a desk, not be blasted with loud announcements every 10 minutes, and would be able to refill our water bottles. (…right?). The lounge entrance had a “we are fully booked” sign, but it was unclear whether they were fully booked or just had the sign ready to put it up.

Lastly, I tried to credit the United cash flight to Aer Lingus, because the WhereToCredit website listed G fare class economy seats as earning 75%, which I thought would be 1,500 Avios (since distance is 2,000 miles), compared to 530 miles on United. But I only got 530 Avios.. which is backed up by United’s website. This is my first time trying to credit flights to another frequent flyer program. Not sure where I went wrong.

Ground Transportation

I saw multiple recommendations online to use the private shuttle companies and I couldn’t quite tell whether this was advice coming from out-of-touch gringos who can’t be bothered to look up local information, or whether it was actually useful advice. USA Transfers quoted $45 CUN-Hyatt, $60 Hyatt-WA, and $65 WA-CUN, but when paying for all three in a “package” they would give a discount which brings it to $45+$45+$60=$165 (it doesn’t add up but the final quote was $165).

After looking at my options, I decided I would only book a $45 shuttle CUN-Hyatt, and figure out the rest once on the ground. The shuttle company tried to upsell the return ticket by offering a $45 discount, which I ignored. My plan was to take the R1 or R2 city bus from Hyatt to Hilton Canopy, and from there, take the free Canopy-Hilton All Inclusive shuttle which departs at 1pm, 5pm, 8pm, and from there use whatever they provide to move to WA. I called Hilton Canopy and they said the free shuttle is only for Hilton AI guests, not for Hilton WA guests, but I felt it was worth trying.

On the day we were checking out, we had a late lunch at Ziva after checkout so the 1pm shuttle was no longer going to work. My second plan was to take the city bus to the southernmost tip of the Hotel Zone/El Rey – either the bus direction change spot or the Westin – and take the Uber from there, saving about $10 in the process. At the end, we were feeling pretty tired after lunch, and decided to just take the Uber directly from Ziva to WA for $35+$1.

For WA-airport, we took an Uber for $18+$1.

Thoughts

In retrospect, knowing how the FNAs didn’t work like I expected, I would have made this trip into a 3-night trip to Hyatt Ziva only. It would have been much lighter for my workload. But that’s hindsight knowing how it all unfolded.