Impressive Premium Punta Cana

We stayed in a premium pool view room, which was spacious, clean and comfortable. We made a point of trying all the different buffets as well as the bars. The restaurants require reservations, and have a dress code (although we witnessed very loose requirements). The buffets offer a huge selection of food options and oh so good! The service at the bars and quality of drinks was great! The two restaurants we tried - Mediterranean and Japanese were good, but just very hot (no AC and no circulating fans). I wasn’t that impressed with the Mediterranean restaurant (the squid ink risotto was not that good, and the snapper over seasoned). The Japanese restaurant - despite a reservation, we had about a 30 minute wait before being seated. The chief was very entertaining and the food was delicious. Again, very hot without any air circulating. We ended up mainly eating at the various buffets as they were cooler with fans and outdoor seating options. The pools are very nice. The beach wasn’t that great (coming from Florida, hard to compare) - lots of cigarette butts and so much seaweed! I guess it was ‘seaweed season’ - very malodorous. The resort doesn’t offer airport shuttle services. We arranged that prior to arrival. Generally a 35 minute ride, costs about $35 one way. There’s only one way in, and there was some construction work going on when we arrived, so it took about an hour. Going back to the airport was 35 minutes. The driving experience is quite interesting 😅 One thing we weren’t expecting: on check in you are immediately hit up with a time share/vacation plan sales pitch. Fortunately we didn’t get suckered into that - as soon as we heard ‘90 minute presentation’ we sternly said no!