Beautiful Resort - But Several Disappointments
Aug 16, 2026 leaseFHS Chicago, Illinois
We recently stayed at Dreams Playa Mujeres and overall found the resort itself to be beautiful, clean, and well maintained. There is a lot to like here, but there are also a few things future travelers should know before booking.
First, the positives. The beach is beautiful and the water was extremely warm during our August stay, which we really…
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We recently stayed at Dreams Playa Mujeres and overall found the resort itself to be beautiful, clean, and well maintained. There is a lot to like here, but there are also a few things future travelers should know before booking.
First, the positives. The beach is beautiful and the water was extremely warm during our August stay, which we really enjoyed. There was significant seaweed, but that is common throughout the area and certainly not something I would hold against the resort. The pools were very nice, the water slides were fun, and the lazy river was a great feature. Overall, the grounds and common areas were kept in excellent condition.
The food was also quite good for an all-inclusive resort. The buffet, cafés, and general food options were better than we expected. The specialty restaurants themselves were good, but actually getting a reservation was unnecessarily difficult. The current process requires guests to log into the app around 1:00 p.m. and essentially keep trying to secure a reservation, often with no success. For a resort at this price point, guests should be able to make restaurant reservations in advance instead of spending part of their vacation repeatedly clicking an app hoping something opens.
For drinks, there is a noticeable difference between the Preferred Club and the rest of the resort. If having access to better liquor and being able to choose premium brands matters to you, I would strongly consider upgrading to Preferred Club. Outside of Preferred, the alcohol selections and drinks felt much more basic.
One of the highlights of our trip was the **30-minute dolphin experience**. The actual interaction with the dolphins was fantastic and, in our opinion, even better than another dolphin encounter we had previously experienced at a different resort. The trainers and experience itself deserve a lot of credit.
Unfortunately, the photography pricing afterward really took away from an otherwise excellent experience. Guests understandably are not allowed to use their own phones during the encounter, so you are dependent on their photography. We expected to pay for pictures, but we were quoted approximately **$250** for the photo package from a 30-minute experience. That was by far the most expensive photo package we have ever encountered and felt extremely excessive. It turned a great memory into a very unpleasant sales experience immediately afterward.
Our biggest disappointment, however, involved our **Diamond membership**. We have invested a significant amount of money into UVC's vacation club membership, and one of the major reasons we chose Diamond over lower membership levels was the room-upgrade benefit.
During our stay, upgraded rooms were available. We were told we could not receive one particular upgrade because our son is 10 years old and that room category required children to be at least 13. We completely understood that restriction. What was disappointing was that there were higher room categories available that did allow children his age, yet no meaningful effort was made to find an alternative solution.
We were not expecting anyone to ignore resort policies. We did, however, expect that being Diamond members would result in some effort to recognize the membership and find an available option that worked for our family. That simply did not happen. Considering the amount members invest specifically to receive these benefits, this was probably the most disappointing part of the trip. Had we known the upgrade benefit would effectively not be available to us, we definitely would have chosen another resort because the 13-year-old room restriction is not across all resorts.
The other major issue was the **pickleball court**. This is important for travelers who actually play pickleball because the court was one of the main reasons we selected Dreams Playa Mujeres over two other resorts we were considering.
Unfortunately, the court was essentially unusable. There were significant dead spots, and the playing surface did not allow the pickleball to bounce properly. We attempted to play for about 10 minutes before giving up. If a resort advertises a pickleball court, guests should reasonably expect a surface on which the sport can actually be played. We absolutely would have selected another resort had we known the true condition of the court beforehand.
So overall, Dreams Playa Mujeres is a very attractive and well-maintained resort with good food, beautiful grounds, nice pools, a great beach, and an excellent dolphin interaction. We enjoyed many aspects of our vacation.
However, the unusable pickleball court, disappointing treatment as Diamond members, frustrating specialty restaurant reservation system, and extraordinarily expensive dolphin photographs kept this from being the experience we expected.
There is a lot of potential here, and with improvements in those areas, this could easily be a resort we would rate much higher.
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