Stay in April

[TIMC]

We spent a week at Iberostar Cozumel April 12-19th 2005, with some apprehension after seeing all the comments on this site.  As it turned out most of the bad stuff was (I think) exaggerated or perhaps some folks expect something different from a tropical vacation. We had a wonderful time.  (This was my 3rd time in Cozumel)  The resort in general was very clean and well kept - but it is pretty much in a 'jungle' setting so you might see the occasional leaf or something around.  The rooms were very clean.  We tipped the maid 2 bucks a day, and the fridge got restocked every day rather than every other day as advertised, and also usually got a towel animal of some sort.  We never actually saw her, but all the staff was very friendly.  The worst part was them working on the porches and stairs of the building next to us - they favor the chain saw as the tool of choice, so an afternoon nap was pretty hard.   No problems with theft - though we didn't tempt anyone by leaving things laying around.  Some minor bug bites - but I also believe they were sand fleas from the beach.  We did have a lizard living in the thatched roof - but never saw him till the 5th day - up until that point we preferred to believe he was on the outside of the thatch.  He didn't hurt anything in any case.  I suspect the downstairs rooms would avoid the 'lizard butler', but not feel as roomy as the high ceiling in ours.
Workout area was surprisingly good - most stuff worked - two bikes, a Stairmaster, and two treadmills (one was down) along with weight machines and free weights.  Not air conditioned, but they had towels to use right there.

The food and drinks were good - the Mexican restaurant was especially good.  The steak restaurant wasn't anything special except for the service.  We made our reservations on arrival  - no problems, but later in the week it got crowded, so it may have been more difficult then.  The regular buffet and the lunch at the pool restaurant were all fine - lots of choices starting at hot dogs and pizza for the kids or those of us that eat like kids.  Some days they were even cooking steaks at lunch.  There were birds and flies as some other people mentioned - like a picnic!

Diving - we dove every day with Dressel.  Make your arrangements ahead of time and get a 15% discount (dresseldivers.com)  They seemed sort of expensive, (we added on a couple of dives)  but it was a good operation.  The staff was all great - most of them spoke English very well, and the instructors all spoke it quite well, so briefings were understandable for us uni-lingual bums.  There were other operators picking up guests at the dock, so that didn't seem to be a problem if you were so inclined, we took the path of least resistance and went with the on-site operator.  They said they tried to group by experience, though it seemed to me that was not always the case.  They would send people up as buddy teams as they ran low on air - so the more experienced people (or the better on air) could stay down longer.  The guides (with one exception - Jaimie, he was very good) didn't seem to find that much unusual marine life - I think partly because some of them had not been on the island that long themselves.  Second reason - they had one leader per group, and the group followed that leader so they occasionally had their hands full just making sure they had the group with them, and couldn't spare much time for finding things like Splendid toadfish, etc.  ( a few years back I dove with Dive Palancar - at the time they used two guides per group - one leader and one trailing, so we found lots of things under the ledges.  Whether they still operate that way I don't know.)  All in all a good dive operator - safe and careful from my observation. (instructor for >15 years so maybe some things make more sense to me since I can guess the reason behind it) Briefings were very good  The boats were not that crowded - at most we had three groups on one boat.  They ran into the dock between morning dives - good for the bathroom break, though there were working heads on the larger two boats anyhow.  Fresh water on board.  Some of us also did the Cenote dive over on the mainland - that was very cool - well worth the trip and extra $.  (The price includes cab rides to/from town, ferry to Playa, lunch, entry fee at the Cenote's etc.)  The '3 Tequila effect' where fresh and salt water mixed as people swam through the halocline was really weird!  The guide wears full cave gear (doubles, long alternate etc.) and you follow cavern diving rules on air etc.

Overall - we'd go back! Right now if possible!