Dreams Bahia Mita Surf & Spa Resort

Dreams Bahia Mita may show up in search results as a five star resort but the reviews skew toward four and if not for a number of older five star reviews it would be sliding towards three. If you do decide to book this hotel you should know a few things in advance. 1)the footprint of property really and truly unmanageably large, you will be walking and you will be climbing stairs and you will be getting lost. You will need 10 to 15 minutes to get from your room to any place on property. You will need to go up an elevator to upper floor in order to catch an elevator to go down to a lower floor. It’s really crazy. 2) the horseshoe design of the hotel combined with the constant number of evening private events ensure that every night you WILL be part of the party, not withstanding that you are not part of the party. It’s constant. 3) the food is just OK, but the rotation of the opening hours of the restaurants is particularly odd. For instance, at any point in time throughout the day half the restaurants will be closed. The hotel offers an app to help sort everything out, but the app is pretty basic in its utility. Overall the property has more in common with a Carnival Cruise Lines both in terms its immense scale and overall hospitality vibe.

My family of 6 spent the week of Dec 23rd at Secrets and had a wonderful time. This is what stood out to us:||Restaurants - Expect a long wait for groups of 5 or more. We had to wait an hour the first night we went to the steak restaurant for dinner. We prepared for this the following days so that one of us would go earlier and wait for the table. All restaurants have excellent food, our favourite was the French one. ||Pools and bars - The hotel is very well designed with 6+ pools and many more bars available. It never felt crowded. ||Beach - It’s a small and rocky beach, but great ocean if you like to surf||Service - The staff is very kind and attentive. A special thank you to Miguel, Rouse, Dario, and Alejandro for making sure we had all we needed and for all the tequila shots!

We had a great week at Dreams this January. The rooms were beautiful and comfortable and always kept clean, thanks to our housekeeper, Marco. The pools were very nice and clean. The whole resort was great and the staff were even better. Everyone was friendly and helpful, Lizbeth at the world cafe buffet was always ready with a smile every morning. We also had a lovely last day with the help of Efrain, one of the pool concierge team, he got us access to the beautiful rooftop bar and pool and arranged for us to have dinner at the secrets side of the resort. Thank you all for the relaxing stay!

We were there for 10 days in mid December. The side trips we did were a “city tour”, rhythms of the night, and whale watching. Whale watching was our favorite. City tour was OK (we skipped the tequila tasting). Rythms of the night: dinner was fair, entertainment was good. |We were impressed with the food at this resort. Much better food here than Hualtulco Secrets. They need to implement cross training between the resorts to raise the overall food quality in Secrets resorts. |The biggest downside, as always, was the UVC sales pitch. I would encourage people to avoid the sales pitch and forego the $300 resort credit. In the end, the resort credit will cost you a lot more money and will consume most of a day of your vacation time. Skip it and enjoy the resort. |The beach area was not great. Too rocky and wavy for open water swimming or snorkling. It is more conducive for surfers.|The hotel is laid out in a way that does not provide many rooms with ocean views. Our room had a view of the workers access road. The UVC sales manager told us he would get us a better view; they moved us up 2 floors overlooking the same access road. The hotel was only ~60% full so it’s frustrating that they did not offer us a better room. That falls into the bucket: Don’t believe UVC sales guys! |Hotel staff was kind and responsive. We particularly enjoyed the staff working at the 8th floor preferred pool. |Room was a decent size and kept clean. However, we were caught by surprise when they sprayed insecticide in our room (no warning, no questions). |One of the special aspects about Puerto Vallarta is the humpback whales, which congregate in the bay from December through March. You can see them from the hotel pretty much every day, but you get more up close and personal if you do a whale watching tour. |If we go back, which we might, we would skip the UVC sales pitch, tell them not to spray insecticide in our room, and enjoy the restaurants and pools. We would likely do another whale watching tour.

This was our 5th trip to the resort, 2nd on the Dreams side. We will come back to Secrets but won't come again with our kids. There are better Dreams resorts. The resort is very large, so expect a lot of walking. The new splash park is great but its at the back of the resort where you cannot enjoy the ocean view. On the Dreams side there is only one small pool with about 25 lounge chairs where you can enjoy the ocean/beach view. If you don't go down by 6:30am to get chairs you will miss out. They do not put a slip matt at the pool entrance and so people crowd more chairs in making it impossible for others to use the pool if you didn't get up early enough to get a front row lounger. Service is great, food is above average for a kid friendly all inclusive. The entertainment is good and their house band is our favorite of all resorts we have been to. My only hesitation in returning with kids is the lack of ocean views at the pools. If you travel without kids and can stay on the Secrets side this resort is 5 stars.

This is our second time staying here for a family vacation and we thoroughly enjoyed our time here. We noticed that the hotel overall is in need of maintenance, caulking in the restrooms, better drying in the shower, condensation leaking from air vents, and hard water stains visible, but service is great. Housekeeping appears to be overworked/understaffed by the speed at which they have to turn over rooms, all the ladies were very kind, but noticeably moving quickly to get to the next room. The turndown service was much appreciated, but a glass was placed close to the edge of the nightstand and fell over and broke when I got the water bottle from behind it. ||The food is really great here. We had remarkable service from Juan at the Bluewater restaurant. Great recommendations, very attentive, and kind. ||We also had great service from Joya at Market Cafe in the mornings for breakfast. Coffee was good and always hot. All milk options were provided. Everything was very clean and all servers were very professional. ||Lastly, Asael at the 8th floor rooftop lounge approached me for this review. He asked me my genuine honest opinion and let me know if they had anything they could improve on to please include.

The resort is very pretty, but the checkin process is lacking. Once we were checked in, there was no direction whatsoever in locating our room. It took us a solid 20 minutes and taking multiple elevators after asking 3 separate staff members once we left the check in desk how to get to our room. It definitely set a poor first impression overall. The entry was chaotic with luggage littering the entire area. Once we got beyond that, the resort really is pretty (overlooking some minor maintenance issues). ||Our particular room was a “partial ocean view”. It definitely was that, but was also primarily a construction zone view. Fortunately we did not spend a ton of time in the room. We had maintenance come to fix a broken shower head, but otherwise, the room was pretty nice. We had turndown service one night out of four. ||The plant based food options are minimal at the resort but we made do. The best place was Himitsu. The chef, Ricardo, should be commended. He made me a gorgeous bowl of tofu during our hibachi dinner. He personally came out and spoke with us to make sure everything was as we wanted. ||We loved the views from the resort too!

We are still at the resort and we’re having an amazing time. We’ve been hanging out on the eighth floor at the preferred pool. We were so happy to have met Rousse the pool concierge who made us feel so welcome and is currently checking in on us every day to make sure we’re having an amazing time. The resort is one of our favourites. Alejandro and Julio are probably the best servers we have ever had at any resort. I will write my final review when we leave, but I would highly recommend coming up to the eighth floor and meeting Rousse and the staff.