Best all-inclusive resorts, SOME PEOPLE LIKE to travel. They love navigating foreign train stations wearing backpacks and clutching phrase books, bound for destinations that remain “authentic.” Others merely go on holiday, booking package tours that promise limitless sunshine, food and booze.
My husband and I have long counted ourselves (smugly) in the first category. But early this year, a particularly grueling winter got the best of us—we needed to get out of New York City, and fast. One frigid March morning, we clicked on the all-inclusive section of the booking site CheapCaribbean.com. A few weeks later we were lying in the sun, daiquiris in hand, as a sunburned German in a Speedo argued with a pool attendant over how long you could lay claim to a lounge chair by leaving your towel on it.
We were at a seaside hotel about 15 miles southeast of La Romana, one of the larger cities in the Dominican Republic—but we could have been almost anywhere sunny. Inside the immaculately landscaped compound, stout swimmers from the former Soviet Union tapped cigarette ash into the infinity pool. Midwesterners hooted as the bartender sloshed refills into their insulated travel mugs. British pensioners cast baleful glances at children splashing around a good-humored hotel employee.
It was a considerable departure for us—and it was heavenly.
We tend to cram as much as possible into our vacations. That means hustling from an ethnic eatery to a museum to some outdoorsy activity like kayaking or bird-watching. We usually stay in apartment sublets. Sure, it’s rewarding. But it takes time to arrange. And last winter, planning was the last thing I felt like doing.
Enter Dreams La Romana Resort & Spa, whose palm trees and azure swimming pools beckoned from the computer screen like a chlorinated Shangri-La. It resembled a fairly posh Florida condo complex. It hit our sweet spot in terms of proximity, amenities and price—more than we usually shelled out for a week-long trip, but not too bad when all we had to do was pick a flight, click on a room and enter a credit-card number.
Before committing, we’d used the reviews site TripAdvisor to narrow down our options. Many reviewers appeared to vacation exclusively at all-inclusive resorts, comparing one to the other the way others might debate the merits of Paris versus London. There were photos of resort “towel creations”: bath linens contorted into the shapes of various exotic animals. It was so not us. But there was sun, and it was easy, and we were going, goddammit.
We landed in Santo Domingo and clambered into a minivan for the hour-plus drive to the hotel, near the village of Bayahibe. After the cinder-block suburbs, the road became more scenic. The turquoise ocean flashed through scrub. Motorbikes chugged along, many loaded with three or four unhelmeted riders.
After the Bayahibe turnoff we drove through a security gate, leaving everyday life in the Dominican Republic behind. The resort’s open-air lobby buzzed with tour operators. Guests with complexions ranging from tomato to well-oiled walnut shuffled past or took pictures of the quarrelsome resident flamingos.
It was a touch overwhelming. All-inclusive resorts aim to buffer guests from the outside world, but they come with their own customs and hassles. Timeshare pitches. Flyers shilling “romantic” dinners at linen-draped tables.
We grabbed a handful of brochures at the registration desk and retreated to our room. It was clean and spacious; swan-shaped towel creations perched on the bed. Hungry, we slathered on sunscreen and headed for one of the few restaurants open in midafternoon, settling into a booth on the patio near a sunburned American couple with a walkie-talkie.
We ordered sandwiches and two cold Presidente beers, then two more. The sea was a vibrant blue, and outdoor speakers piped samba covers of songs by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses.
“I used to love her,” the singer crooned, “but I had to kill her…”
The walkie-talkie at the next table crackled.
“No, they do not have nachos,” the man replied. “Over.”
We made some novice mistakes in the first few days. We attended an “orientation” that was actually just a pitch for dune-buggy and zip-line tours. We downed free shots of sickly sweet amaretto at the Mexican restaurant. Most critically, we failed to map out a lounge-chair strategy.
Ambling down to the pool in late morning, we realized that all the shaded seats were taken—bad news for two pasty New Yorkers.There were towels on the lounges, and magazines, but most remained uninhabited for hours at a stretch. Later, after reading my irate post on social media, an Irish friend emailed to fill me in on the so-called “war of the beach towels,” in which vacationers compete for prime space. En route to breakfast the next morning, we took a lesson from the Speedo-clad German and deposited our towels on a pair of chairs under a palm tree.
Our days began to fall into a comfortable routine. Breakfast on an oceanside terrace, then hours of indolence until late afternoon, when we decamped to the Manatees swim-up bar to drink a caloric concoction called the Dirty Banana and watch the sunset. We learned to hit the fruit stand on the beach early in the day, and to sip Brugal Extra Viejo, a smooth dark rum, on the rocks when tropical drinks proved too cloying.
To mix it up, one night we hit the casino—small, clanging, brightly-lit—then the disco, where we danced until very late with an exuberant British-Belgian group attending a wedding. Another day we booked a snorkeling trip to a nearby island, our only responsibility being to show up.
I felt odd about not seeing more of the country, though we did take in a Vegas-style theatrical extravaganza based loosely on the history of the island’s indigenous population. It involved fire, dancing and fight scenes. I had brought a Junot Diaz story collection on our trip; its scathing description of the nearby, very exclusive Casa de Campo resort—he calls it “the Resort that Shame Forgot,” with “a massive melanin deficit”—elicited a twinge of guilt.
The Dominicans we did encounter were largely staff. They were warm and unfailingly pleasant. Some of our exchanges involved awkward Spanglish, but they were still smoother than the time we were trying to catch a ferry in Brazil and were reduced to drawing pictures of a boat.
And for those who enjoy people-watching, all-inclusives provide their own brand of cultural tourism. We eavesdropped on a tense, elegantly dressed French family at dinner, and watched in awe as a group of Ukrainians dispensed shots from a bottle of vodka they toted around.
It wasn’t exclusive. Nor was it remote or unspoiled. But we returned to real life with our shoulders several notches lower than they’d been when we left. What more could you ask from a vacation?
