We recently took a family vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the Grand Luxxe resort. We have been afraid to travel to Mexico for the last four years because of all the reports of violence. My in-laws talked us into joining them at their time share and oh boy are we glad we did. First of all the resort arranges transportation to and from the airport, it was a short 15 minute drive. We were surprised when we passed a drive-thru Starbucks on our way in!
We never left the resort so I can’t really speak to how safe the city was in general. The parts we drove through were definitely a poorer area and we did see plenty of armed police. We never felt unsafe at any time. Once we arrived at the resort we never looked back though. It was lush, beautiful, and huge!
View from our room
Our room was absolutely amazing. My in-laws upgraded their normal suite to a 2 bedroom so we could all be together. We even had small wading pool on the deck which the kids loved! We really enjoyed having a kitchen, we made breakfast most mornings which allowed everyone to sleep in and saved us some money too. The property had its own grocery store and we purchased all our breakfast items as well as some lunch items from there. We were happy to find PB&J for the kids as well as some snack items. We could have saved money by going to a Walmart off of the property but we honestly didn’t want to deal with the hassle of it with the kids and the pool time wasted!
Deck
Kitchen
Bedroom
Our first day we were all a little tired from the traveling day and we couldn’t enter our room until 5pm, so we ended up exploring the property and then staying in the room for the night to unpack and just enjoy each others company for the evening. We were able to order pizza to the room which was really nice. We brought a few toys, coloring books and movie loaded iPads for the girls for the plane ride and they enjoyed these in the room on the first night. They also took their first dip in the wadding pool on the deck.
Waiting for the plane with new My Little Pony
The next day we visited the pool that was closest to our building, the Grand Luxxe Tower 4. I am still not sure how many pools were on this property and we definitely did not get to visit them all. I think each building had their own pools, a total of eight buildings is my math is right, but the each “pool” was really multiple pools put together. One was even on a roof top! I loved the pool by our building as it was a little quieter and offered some nice upgraded amenities. The chairs by the pool were much nicer and more comfortable and they had awesome cabanas. They offered free Popsicle and ice cream cones several times a day, someone would come around and offer to clean your sunglasses, towels were abundant and did not need to be checked out with your room number, and they had nice activities you could do right by the pool. The girls made bracelets the first pool day.
Grand Luxxe Tower 4 pool
Cabanas at the Grand Luxxe Tower 4 pool
They had a nice kids club right next door with a fun kids pool. They also had a kids recreation room that showed movies and did arts and crafts, kids five and above could be dropped off for the activities for the day. We never took advantage of this though so I can’t speak to this service. Nana and Papa wanted to get the most of the kid time and quite frankly so did we.
Kids Club
Kids Club
That’s enough for this post, in the next one I will talk to some of the other pools, night life, and of course the FOOD!