Our third Desire Pearl Trip (7/22-7/27, 2018)

We travelled 7/22-7/27 this year for our third trip to Desire Pearl. I will be cross-posting this to the DesireMexico forum as well as AdultTravelForum sites. Instead of a day-by-day chronicle of what we did, I’ll just hit the highlights/lowlights and the major changes to the resort since our last trip.

The Food
I was never a huge fan of the food at Pearl, but my wife was. She much preferred it to that served at Hedonism in Jamaica. We were both very surprised to see that during our stay, Aphrodite had a fixed menu of Mexican food and it never changed our entire trip. We were also disappointed to see that Pearl had switched to a single menu of either Italian or French food depending on which day it was. Unik was largely unchanged as far as we could tell. These changes severely limited our dinner choices each day. We heard this might have just been a two week experiment. We realize it’s impossible to please all the people all the time, but this made our visit very challenging each night at dinner.

The Service
We found the service at lunch and dinner to be very slow each day. I’m not quite sure what the cause was. We spent 90-120 minutes at dinner at all three restaurants on property and lunch took an hour several times when one of us ordered off the menu instead of the buffet. That seems excessive, especially at times when the place wasn’t even full. This is an improvement over the 3 hours it took at Pearl on our two previous trips. At the risk of sounding like a jaded snobby guest, things just weren’t as snappy as we remembered from previous trips. We heard this from several other guests, so it wasn’t just us experiencing the delays at mealtime.

The Beach
We had read about the Sargasso grass problem on the forums prior to our trip, so we kind of knew something was up. We definitely underestimated the scope of the problem. The recent storm/hurricane had literally cut several feet of beach off the shore. The distance from the edge of the volleyball court to the water was dramatically shorter than our previous trip. A good amount of what was left of the beach was then taken up by nasty Sargasso grass that kept rolling in on the waves. It started to stink really bad too. We walked from Puerto Morelos all the way up to Riviera Maya and saw pretty much the same thing. Every resort was struggling with this issue, so we obviously can’t blame Desire for this naturally occurring problem. Nevertheless, it was disappointing. The silver lining is that we had free run of any lounge chair or beach bed every single day since nobody was hanging out there all week.

The Entertainment
The themes this year didn’t inspire us, so we sat out most of them. The coolest performance I saw all week was during the Neon Night show. The performers they had come in used these super cool LED sticks that animated graphical patterns in light as they twirled them in circles to the music. It was one of the most innovative shows I’ve seen at Pearl ever. Kudos to those performers, I made a special mention to entertainment coordinator Roberto about how much I enjoyed this show. One thing they added since our previous trip was a Male and Female intimate massage class hosted by Richard and Lauren from the Room 77 Podcast. We attended the Wednesday yoni massage seminar and it was one hour very well spent. Getting to meet the people behind the voices on their podcast was also a treat.

The People
As always, the people that show up during your trip will largely dictate the mood and energy of the resort while you’re there. Last time, we joined a Kik group and had a great time getting to know people ahead of our trip. With that in mind, we created our own Kik group and wound up with 23 couples that would all overlap sometime during the 4th week in July. These folks turned out to be a great group of people. The majority were all Americans, but we even had two international couples from Europe and Africa. We really enjoyed meeting everyone from our group in person and plenty of other couples who weren’t in our Kik group as well. We certainly feel like we left Pearl with more friends than we showed up with and that’s a great feeling.

The Facilities
Remember that magical scent that greeted you whenever you walked in the front door of the resort? Unfortunately, it’s gone. We’re not sure if that’s a permanent or temporary change, but it’s very unwelcome. The swing that used to be out on the beach near the pier is also gone. It wasn’t clear why they took it out. We had two minor issues in our room when we arrived. After reporting them to the front desk, they were addressed that night to our satisfaction. On our last day, we went to the spa. The hot tub in the spa only had functioning jets on one side of the tub and the spa’s full body spray shower was non functional. Since our last trip, they turned the entertainment coordinator space just off the pool into a permanent weatherproof structure where the DJ could hang out all day. The daily activity schedule was moved over to the side of Aphrodite next to the restrooms. This change mainly benefits the employees, not the guests, so I have no opinion on it. The one change that was a significant improvement was the addition of a men’s and women’s restroom behind the hot tub bar. I heard one person describe it as a game changer, and I have to agree. You no longer have to hike all the way back to the restrooms outside Aphrodite when you’re in the hot tub. The one thing I desperately wish they would add is a shade canopy over some portion of the pool. I don’t care where they put it, just please add some shade. With the sole exception of the tiny roof overhang near the swim up bar, there’s absolutely no escape from the searing hot sun anywhere in the pool. Please throw up three posts and hang a triangular shade canopy over some of the water for relief!

After three trips, we probably won’t be going back to Pearl. Been there, done that, and came away slightly disappointed this time. This might be the trigger that gets us back to Hedonism for our next naughty vacation to check out all the renovations that have been done since our last trip there back in 2013.