Courteous and gracious service
Fairmont Mayakoba has the potential to be a top destination. Indeed the staff was universally warm and for the most part, professional. The improvement would be in the way of "small things."
When we arrived and unpacked for our stay, we noticed that there was water on the bathroom floor around the toilet. We sopped it up with a towel and noticed that it was seeping out from under the toilet... It was a wax seal leak. We were able to get maintenance to fix it that evening. Certainly the maid must have missed the leak in the morning? The next morning, I leaned into the shower stall and turned the shower water on and the base of the shower hose was leaking badly... It actually was spraying water straight out of the shower door, into my face. I tried to fix it without tools but it was cross threaded tightly onto the base and I decided it was not worth dealing with. There were other little things... In order to turn on the bathroom lights, you had to go through the double doors of the bathroom and shut one to get at the light switch. Poor electrical planning. There were not enough outlets. None on the balcony for a laptop or charging a phone. It would have been nice to have had a table on the balcony and a couple of chairs, rather than a chaise lounge and an ottoman. The Nespresso coffee maker was great, but you had to figure out how to use it. The ice machine on our floor wasn't working and we inquired and were told that we had to go to a different floor for ice. There was no clock in the room to know what time it was during the night or early dawn. Little things. Most avoidable. The food was good, the service was great, there was so much to enjoy... We are at L Laguna for all four breakfasts and one dinner... It was very good food. But when we inquired about sitting outside, we got the feeling that many of the seats were being reserved for "other people...". Unless we specified where we wanted to sit, we felt that "better seats" were being reserved for more important guests. It was a little odd because there were often many seats available but we were made to feel like it was an effort to sit where we wanted. The check-in process seemed long. We got in after 11 hours of travel time from our home in New England and had to stand in line for about twenty minutes before being able to meet with a front desk person. It took about five to ten minutes to check in, which seemed unnecessary. What would have been nice would have been a ten minute video, emailed in advance, allowing one to get familiar with the resort before arrival. The checkout process seemed much faster and was seamless, but I could see how there could be confusion about what was included and what wasn't. To me, it seemed odd that there were menu items which were off limits to all inclusive customers but the waiter at Tauro did a great job up front of indicating that anything printed in red was extra. But the restaurants which were not included were 20% or 50% off and initially, it was hard to know which were which. If the check-in clerk said that everything at the beach had unique terms it would have been nice, but all he did was circle the three restaurants on the guide, without saying that they were the ones at the beach.
The transportation to and from the beach was very good. It was a beautiful place and we would look forward to a return at some point... But when you're expecting something a bit more well organized for the money, you can't help but feel a little frustration. It's more a matter of many tiny things that frankly, eventually add up.