Another Moon Palace The Grand Review
Just got back from a week at Moon Palace The Grand with my wife and 4-year-old son. We had very similar experiences as the person who left this recent review: https://www.reddit.com/r/AllInclusiveResorts/comments/1tck5l0/honest_review_of_the_grand_moon_palace/
Last year we stayed at Excellence Playa Majures so that's my reference point when describing our trip to Moon Palace The Grand.
Positives of Moon Palace The Grand:
-The waterpark is really good. There are three sliding areas - small one for toddlers (probably ideal for kids 2-5), medium-sized one for kids in the middle (ideal for ages 4-15), and a large one for teens and adults. We spent a lot of time on the middle one which had three moderate slides and adults are allowed on the slides. My son loved it. We didn't try the large slide area. The poolside servers were fantastic. We went to the waterpark every day.
-Indoor play area was great too. Located in the middle of the waterpark. There's a play structure, arcades, an escape room, a mirror maze, bumper cars, and a "sky trail" (my son was barely tall enough - 40" - to go on this with a chaperone (i.e., me) and he had a blast). They served terrible looking food (pizza, hotdogs) that my son loved. The kids club is upstairs. We didn't use it.
-The shows were really good. Of the ones we saw, I would rank them:
Glow Show
Ages of Rock
Magician
Clown Show
Michael Jackson tribute
Fire show (I'd avoid this one altogether - very repetitive)
We were disappointed that there was no Luche Libre (wrestling) show the week we were there.
-Dinner restaurants were excellent. Each one has a signature cocktail list, lots of food variety and all the dishes I got were tasty, and the service was very good (one exception noted below). We went to Jade (Asian) twice. Also great were JC Steakhouse, Tavola (Italian), Casa Mia (Mexican), and Habibi (Lebanese). The Circus was a fun dining experience for our son. The breakfast buffets were fine. Lunch restaurants were generally fine. Room service food was hit and miss.
-Ninth Pin bowling alley was great as a sports bar which allowed us to watch NHL games. The bartenders were fantastic.
-Wired Lounge was filled with fun games to play. However, there's a section at the back where teens were simply playing online games like they would at home and it was a bit of a grim scene. It's loud in there.
-I went golfing and the course was tremendous. It's a Jack Nicklaus designed course with 3 nine-hole courses and on the day I went we were playing The Jungle and The Dunes. Immaculate fairways and greens. Lots of bars throughout the course for free drinks and food. If you're a high handicap like me, bring lots of balls otherwise you'll be paying exorbitant prices for balls. You will lose many. And if you go into the woods to look for a ball there are snakes and other critters. I saw a massive snake in the woods and I never went back in. There are also signs warning of crocodiles in the water hazards but I didn't see any.
-My wife went to the spa and said it was the best spa experience of her life (and she's gone to many). It was very expensive but she said it was worth it. She got a facial treatment but she was in there for hours enjoying the hydrotherapy and whatnot.
-The resort app is really handy and easy to use.
Negatives of Moon Palace The Grand:
-The goddamn timeshare aspect. You can call them "memberships" or whatever but let's call a spade a spade. These are timeshares. A huge part of their business appears to be selling timeshares to guests. Right after you check in, they send you to someone at a desk who will explain their convoluted "resort credit" system and try to get you to commit to attending a timeshare presentation the next day in exchange for more resort credits with fewer restrictions or something like that. These resort credits are basically like Itchy and Scratchy money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-6IzkDyl9Q
I knew going in that I would never sit through a timeshare presentation with my 4-year-old in tow during my vacation so I refused. He tried a few tactics on me to get me to agree but I held firm and he didn't press it too much. Throughout the week we saw hundreds of people getting carted to the building where they do the presentations. So lots of people do it and if you can squeeze them for a bunch of credits that you'll use, then maybe it's worth it. Definitely not for me.
Then when we checked out, a guy literally followed me into the bathroom to try to get me to agree to some kind of offer to stay at the resort again at a reduced rate (of course, you had to commit to something right away). I had to tell him to leave me alone. Super obnoxious. The whole resort would be way better without the timeshare nonsense hovering over everything.
-The resort is borderline too large. They have carts that can drive you around with a whole "bus system" with different routes throughout the resort but I saw a lot of people waiting around at the stations for carts to arrive. We ended up walking to most places and it wasn't too bad. But if you have mobility issues, I would avoid this resort.
-The beach isn't great. The water is murky and there are a lot of waves. We walked along it once and didn't go back. There weren't many people sitting on the beach.
-Housekeeping was unreliable. First couple of days they didn't come and we had to call to get someone to make up our room. They were better after that. We got room service one night and the dirty dishes were left there for two days. There was a giant cockroach in our room that hid in my wife's shoe. She stepped on it. It was lowkey hilarious (to me) but she's still talking about it.
-The resort credits are fairly confusing. That's probably by design. We got "$500 resort credits" but you can only use something like $165 credits on the spa and all the spa services are approximately $165 more expensive than they'd be anywhere else (you see what they did there?). You also have to pay 16% on all credits used. For example, my wife's facial treatment was like $325 USD. She used $165 credits, paid 16% on that ($26), and then paid $325 - $165 = $160, so $186 out of pocket for the service. I used most of the rest of our credits for golf. Green fees were $310 each and I had to rent clubs for $90. I used $310 in credits for the green fee but paid 16% tax ($310*0.16 = $50) and then $90 on the clubs = $140 out of pocket for the round. TBF, both were were worth the out-of-pocket expenses. They could just price these things reasonably to begin with instead of using credits.
-Random things are overpriced. They charge $50 for bowling and gift shop items were outrageously expensive (e.g., $12 for a bag of chips). Bowling should be free and included in the "all inclusive" part of the resort.
-We went to Los Tacos for lunch one day and the experience was miserable. We were seated by the pool and nobody took our orders for about 10 minutes. After we ordered we sat there for another 40 minutes before I had to go ask the manager where our food was. He didn't seem to know where our server went. Someone else came out and plopped our food on the table without saying a word. A maintenance guy was blasting a leaf blower nearby. It's unfortunate because the tacos were amazing.
-Long wait times for certain things. For example, the International Buffet in the morning got crazy busy after 9:30 am. Their process for seating people is wildly inefficient. The cafe was also busy and had very long wait times.
-We had a swim-up suite and the swim-up part was not as nice as our swim-up suite last year at Playa Majures. We didn't use it as much because of that.
-The wifi was patchy, especially in our room (building 89).
Conclusion
Overall, despite the negatives, we had a great time at this resort. We like to try different places, so we'd be unlikely to go back. However, I would tentatively recommend this resort to families.