My husband and I just returned from a weeklong vacation at the Melia Puerto Vallarta. We were there from 06/30-07/06. We flew from Charlotte to Phoenix to Puerto Vallarta. When we arrived in Puerto Vallarta, we had no problems going through customs. We got our luggage quickly and were ready to leave the airport within 30 minutes of landing. Be wary of the timeshare people (they wear blue shirts). Keep walking until you see the transportation people. If you do not have pre-arranged transportation, I highly recommend that you cross the orange bridge that takes you across the street and catch a cab for $5 or $6 to the Melia...it's only a 5 minute ride to the hotel. If you take the taxis that are at the airport, they cost triple that! Our room was not ready upon check-in. However, the front desk clerk secured our luggage and gave us our bracelets. We went to get something to eat and when we returned, our room was ready. We stayed in Building 1, Second Floor. The front desk clerk originally put us in Building 4, First Floor. However, when I told him that I was leary of staying on the first floor, he quickly moved us to the other room. We had a non-smoking room with 2 double beds. We would have preferred a kingsize bed, but were pleased with our beautiful view of the gardens and mountains. One bed was EXTREMELY hard, so we stayed in the other and it was sufficient. The bathroom appeared to have been recently remodeled...beautiful marble countertops and tub. The water pressure in the bathtub was the strongest I have ever felt in a hotel...definitely a plus! The mini-bar fridge was stocked with bottled water everyday. This helped because you do not want to drink the water. We even used the bottled water to brush our teeth. We would usually tip housekeeping $2 a day and they would not only clean our rooms and restock our mini-bar, but also leave towel animals on our bed! The pool is HUGE! I have never seen a pool this large before. It is the largest pool in all of Puerto Vallarta. The water is like bath water, but would feel cooler in the morning or after it rained. Speaking of rain...it rained nearly everyday while we were there. But, don't let this spoil your vacation. Even though the walkways were flooded one night and we had to walk barefoot to get to the theater to watch the show, the staff worked hard to get the resort looking immaculate by the next morning. Also, it usually only rains for an hour or two each day. It barely interrupted our fun...just gave us an excuse to go inside and get cleaned up for dinner. The food was good (not great), but definitely not 5 star cuisine. We ate breakfast each morning at Quetzal. It's a buffet. The staff does a great job of seating you quickly and bringing you coffee or juice. They serve a wide variety of traditional Mexican and American foods. Something for everyone. We ate at either La Palapa or the Snack Bar for lunch. La Palapa was the buffet with pasta, pizza, fajitas, teriakyi, etc. I am somewhat picky and easily found something that I liked. The Snack Bar had hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, fries, nachos, and ice cream. We would grab it and bring it with us poolside. For dinner, you could eat at Quetzal (the buffet) place. They would have a theme each night. You could also eat at Los Azulejos (the Mexican restaurant), La Palapa (Seafood), or Los Vitrales (the Italian restaurant). We ate at Los Azulejos twice. We liked that best. La Palapa was good. My husband had the steak there and he seemed to like it. We were not that impressed with the Italian restaurant. It wasn't bad, but not something that was worth returning to for a second time. You have to make reservations there, which wasn't a problem. But, we preferred the Mexican and Seafood places more. The waiters and barstaff do a fabulous job of bringing/serving drinks. Remember to ask for "Bacardi" or "Absolut" because otherwise they will serve you the house liquor. My only complaint was that there were TONS of bees at the pool bar! However, they didn't seem to bother the bar staff in the least. The lobby bar stays open until 1AM. One night, my husband and I closed the bar down and they hooked us up with several drinks before they turned off the lights. Each night there is entertainment at 9:30PM. We went every night except one (we missed the Comedy Show). I liked all of them except the Illusions show (it was a little too weird for me, but my husband liked it). I highly recommend that you go to these. The staff does a wonderful job of getting the audience involved. Also, they had some kind of show for the kids beforehand. After the show, there was either Karoake or disco music for the night owls. Overall, our experience at the Melia Puerto Vallarta was a pleasant one. If we are ever in Puerto Vallarta again, we would be willing to stay there. It is reasonably priced and a nice resort for couples and families.

We just returned from a 5 night 6 day stay at the Melia. Our family included my husband/myself our three kids 19/17 and 3 1/2. First THE GOOD...Staff is very friendly! Pool is toddler friendly, our 3 1/2 yr old was able to stand in a large section of it and had a lot of fun. Rooms were clean but nothing special. Appeared to be making small improvements on the property. Great views! The Italian and Mexican sit down restaurants were good. Koi pond was nice. Nobody bothered us with timeshare sales. Staff offers shows and corny pool activities that were somewhat entertaining. Downtown PV is an $8/15 min cab ride away. Airport is 5$/5 min cab ride away. Lots of pool seating. Lobby bar area is nice for cards/games. Felt safe on the property. Now, THE BAD...Hotel needs some TLC, lots of missing pool tiles, rust, dripping ceilings and flooded hallways and walk ways during and after rain (which is quite often this time of year) . Property needs a face lift. The buffet offerings are decent but a little sketchy (our teenagers stayed with what they termed "safe" items and held out for dinner @ the sit down restaurants). On rainy days the pool is filled with locals (it is warm enough to swim even in the rain) and we never could figure out why except that the hotel does offer a day pass for a certain fee so maybe that's why. The resort is mainly local visitors about a 75/25 % ratio. Not sure where Americans go to stay in PV but it wasn't this place. Beds not comfortable. Italian restaurant very good but had a sewage odor. Didn't seem to clean up the pool area very much, many cups/plates etc. laying around especially on the rainy days. Now for THE UGLY...we requested a hospitality suite to shower and get cleaned up after some pool time before our flight home. Check out is 12 noon, period, no late check out. The room was nasty...no towels, wet towels on the floor and empty shampoo bottles/lids in the bathtub. Guess they don't clean betwwen visitors. Yuck! Both my husband and myself got sick, me on day 3 and him on day 4 (thankfully the kids didn't get sick). Traveler's Diarreahea...not fun...and still sick with it! DO bring cards and games to play when it rains...nothing to do. DO the Canopy Tour, my husband and older boys LOVED it!

I believe that the overall experience of "okay, but some problems" is a pretty accurate description of this resort. Not terrible, not excellent, just okay with some problems. So here is our cautionary tale of our week-long trip to Melia Puerto Vallarta. After traveling for most of the day, with five children in tow, we were all ready to get to our rooms, then get something to eat. For reasons still unknown, check-in took 30 minutes, and everyone was irritable (we had three rooms, everything was pre-booked, so it should have been simple). Our room smelled moldy, although our family in the other two rooms said theirs were fine. The decor was dated, 70's style, with orange and brown accents. We later found out that the hotel was in the process of being remodeled; the hotel was purchased two years ago by Melia, and the "new" owners were still updating things. As I learned, projects don't seem to move too fast in Mexico. After our bags were dropped off, we headed to the open-air lunch grill to eat. As we quickly learned, "open-air" also means "birds on the buffet." Several black raven-type birds constantly landed on the salad bar, reached in and took food, then flew away. One of the birds landed in the cole slaw dish and stayed there for a while. At first it was comical, but we quickly became disgusted thinking of the diseases the birds could be passing on, both from the germs on their feet and beaks, and from any bird droppings that they may have left in the food. My wife, a nurse, lost her appetite for the first two days from that. [NOTE: after complaining about the birds to the general manager, he had nets put over the buffet bars to keep out the birds.] The pool was nice, kid-friendly, although people should know that because of the heat, the pool gets very warm in the afternoon, more like a lukewarm bath than a refreshing cool swim. The pool is only about 4 1/2 feet deep at the deepest point, a good depth for the kids to swim. We spent most of our time at the pool, several hours each day. The staff has some cheesy, but fun activities each morning for the pool crowd. The swim-up bar is good, even for the kids to go up to and order non-alcoholic drinks (pinada, pink panther,shirley temples, and yabba dabba doo are good tropical drinks for the kids with no alcohol). The hotel grounds are pretty, lots of palm trees with coconuts, along with lots of other tropical plants, and several ponds. The central pond has a lot of wildlife, including some different ducks, hundreds of koi fish, and...iguanas. All of them like to be fed, and we have a lot of good pictures of the iguanas coming close for food. People should know that although this is billed as "an all-inclusive beach resort," the beach is basically non-existent. Yes, the Pacific Ocean is at the back of the property, and there is a beachy area, although there is only about 300 feet of usable beach. The rest of the beach has been washed away, with the waves coming all the way up to the hotel's retaining wall. What beach is left is an angled, odd-shaped piece, and the ocean floor is covered with rounded rocks (they don't have many shells here, just rocks that wash up). As with other touristy areas in Mexico, there are always people on the beach trying to sell you something...boat rides, hair braids, henna tattoos...and they are somewhat persistent, although after a couple of "no's" they leave you alone and move on to the next guy. The hotel has a sign that says the beaches are federal property, and they are not affiliated with or responsible for any of the beach vendors (meaning they can't run them off, either). Most people are used to long, wide beaches that you can stroll on, or come out for a morning jog. The beaches here are very different...they are sectioned off for each hotel, with wave breaks made of large rocks jutting out at every hotel's property lines. I suppose you could use a beach area of another resort, although you would have to do some rock-climbing up and down to get to the next resort's piece of beach. Also the hotels are all built close to the water, so the beach area is fairly narrow. We went down there a few times, but did not spend much time at the beach at all. Food...generally was good, mostly buffet style, all you can eat of course. The quality of the food was good, although surprisingly the fruits did not taste as fresh as one would expect, being in the tropics. The milk is not homogenized, and although I liked it, we did not use it for our infant because we were not sure if it was safe for him. The Italian restaurant and the formal Mexican restaurant on the property were both good, although you have to make reservations for the Italian one. We arrived on a Friday and found that the Italian restaurant was already booked thru Sunday, and closed on Monday. We made reservations for Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday is couples only night, no kids. The bartenders are very accomodating, and they have a large selection of familiar, top-shelf liquors. If you are an experienced drinker and know what to ask for, you will do fine. I am not, so I spent the first couple days drinking pina coladas and banana mamas that another couple turned me on to. There is no menu posted anywhere, but I was surprised one day to see a drink menu out. If you ask for it, the bartender may have one behind the bar. It was helpful because it listed a lot of drinks, including a section of non-alcoholic drinks for the kids. Tip: unless you ask specifically, the bartenders will use the well liquors in the drinks. If you ask for, say, Bacardi Rum in your pina colada, they will do it, but if you don't ask, they will give you what they have in the fountain tapper. The staff were friendly, all spoke English to a cerain degree, some more than others, but all spoke enough English well enough to bring you a drink. I did abandon one conversation though, when I was asking a front desk attendant if they stocked any mouthwash (mine disappeared in the room, presumably the glass bottle was dropped by the housekeeper and broken, but the front desk attendant had no idea what I was talking about, and I did not feel like playing charades to explain it to her!). One downside I noticed was that some things didn't get cleaned up quickly. There are a ton of service people up and down the halls everyday, but when I set out four used cups to be picked up, they sat outside our room for a day and half. And there was a pair of kid's superhero underwear in one of the ponds in our hallway...we noticed it the first day and laughed...then we noticed it every other day we were there. We ended up talking to the manager about our room, and we mentioned the underwear in the pond. That was four days into our stay, and three days later when we left the resort, the underwear was still there. We even have a picture of it. Our room's air conditioner was horrible. We had it turned to the coldest level, and still it was barely cooler than the outside temp. After complaining to the manager about the air conditioner and the musty smell, they brought us a dehumidifier and a portable air conditioning unit (that looked like a jumbo sized dehumidifier). The dehumidifier rattled as loud as a lawn mower, so we had to stop using it. The portable a.c. was loud too, and it put out a lot of heat from the sides and back. Then it leaked a huge pool of water on the floor underneath. We called the front desk, and they sent a maid and a repairman. The maid mopped up the water, and the repairman went into the bathroom to check what he thought was a leaking shower (language barrier issue). When the maid told him the problem was with the a.c. unit, he looked at it and found that two of the casters were missing, causing water to spill out of the unit. The solution? They put a towel under the unit and left. A few hours later the towel was soaked through, and water was on the floor again. We stopped using the unit, and they removed it a couple days later. It was very hot and hard to get to sleep for all of us...the manager did offer to move us, and normally that's what we would have done, but since we had two other rooms close with our other family members, we decided to stick it out, and we did not have much good sleep. The room had a dresser with eight medium sized drawers, but they smelled so musty that we could not put our clothes in them. We lived out of our suitcases for the week. Even if the drawers had been usable, that was not enough drawer space for 5 people. Also the bunk bed was a good selling point, but turned out to be useless...the top bunk had only a tiny rail, not enough protection to keep the kids from rolling out. And if someone slept on the bottom bunk, every time they moved, the bed squeaked LOUDLY. So four of us squeezed into the two double beds, with the baby in the porta-crib they brought for us. One other, not so minor detail people should be aware of, which we were not...the public water is not purified, and you cannot drink it or you will get sick. I had always heard people joke, "Don't drink the water in Mexico," but it is absolutely true. A hotel rep informed us of this fact on the way to the room. You can use the shower and sink water to wash up, but DO NOT ingest any of it. The hotel provided an unlimited supply of bottled water, but if you can imagine brushing your teeth with a bottle of water, it does not work out so well. You never can really get your toothbrush clean. I was paranoid and always rinsed my hands with bottled water after washing my hands with soap and sink water. Some of our family got diarrhea there, presumably from the water. Melia is billed as a family resort, where you can leave your kids at the babysitting while the adults go play. Many people used the babysitting, but we did not. We met one couple from Chile whose young child became sick, and they were certain it came from the babysitting area. They believed the ball pit and other toys were not properly disinfected, and their son got diarrhea and was throwing up for five days at the resort. To be fair, we did not hear any other stories like that, but we did not want to take the chance with our child. Also, they do not let you stay in the babysitting area if there is more than one child there...so you don't have the opportunity to really check out the place like you might want to. Also notable: people should know that the activities they provide -- archery, shooting, batting cages, etc -- are only offered during very limited times, I believe two days a week for an hour or two. And they are not what you would expect...they look like activities you would set up in your backyard. The rock climbing (free) and the zip line ($5) were very good activities, again offered only during certain times though. One other notable detail: they have tiny mosquitoes there that bite and leave red circular marks. We first noticed the marks on our child's face, and we thought he had some sort of measles or chicken pox. After talking with staff, we learned about the mosquitoes, so tiny that you cannot see them. We were told that the housekeepers spray the rooms each day to kill the mosquitoes, but if you open your balcony door you will let in tons of them. Then we started thinking about all the stagnant ponds of water on the property, which are perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes, one of them right outside our front door. The bigger ponds have fountains, but the smaller ones have no water flow at all. This review has a lot of negatives, I know....but our trip was not all negative. The kids had a lot of fun in the pool, everyone loved the iguanas, the shows were mostly good (though they started late for the kids...9:30 PM!), food was pretty good and available most of the time, the tropical gardens were pretty, and the staff tried to be helpful. The quality was less than we expected, we expected an all inclusive resort to be more similar to our experiences on cruise ships. We would not return to Melia or recommend it necessarily, although we realize that if we did not have small children, our experiences might have been much better as far as being able to enjoy meals more and being able to lounge at the pool instead of watching the kids all the time. Hopefully this review is helpful to fill in info that is not in the Melia brochures.

We are a family of 5, two 16 yr olds, and a 13 yr old, all boys, and we loved every part of our stay at the Melia! The staff was incredible, super friendly, courteous, and attentive. The resort is beautiful, well kept, and from what we could observe, improvements being made. A lot of activities go on throughout the day, pool games, exercise classes, beach volleyball, kayaking, etc. Definitely something for everyone if they are so inclined. The mixed drinks at the pool bar could be weak, but that just meant I could drink more, which was OK by me! If one truly wished to "tie one on" you could order straight shots, or beer. The food was fabulous!! The buffet's were very good as were each of the restaurants (hint, La Palapa opens on the beach side in front, the inside stays dark, if you come up from the hotel side, it looks closed). We also loved the lobby bar, at the end of a long day the family would relax, listen to music, and have some cold drinks (virgin drinks for the kids of course) It was amazing to us what a wonderful family atmosphere the entire resort had, including the lobby bar...so relaxing and refreshing. I heard one couple criticize the food, people should remember, this is Mexico, many of the patrons are from Mexico, and most of the staff is Mexican, so the food isn't going to taste like something made in Nebraska. We also did some excursions, we highly recommend the catamaran tour through Vallarta Adventures, super fun! The Los Veranos Canopy Tour was fun, but probably better when the weather is a little cooler and less humid. The only thing I would change about this vacation would be to make it longer, and spend more time at this fabulous resort. There were several activities I didn't participate in that looked like great fun. Our family will definitely go back!

Our week started out with 4 days of bad weather. The hotel was good, but our trip, not so much! The food is pretty good, you can usually find something to eat. We enjoyed the La Palapa lunch buffet the best. The Italian restaurant is gross. The food did get old after a while. The deserts are not great either. Our room was an awesome upgrade to an ocean view. It is small though, and the beds are double size. Which I now know is too small for my husband and I after 7 days. We had a bottle of champagne in our room after check in. The staff is really nice and friendly. I would definitely stay here again. One complaint is that when it was raining for days, they should have worked harder to entertain the guests. Also, the pool could have been cleaner. Oh, and one day they turned off the power and water for 4 hours. Then they charged us for late check out. Still all and all it was a good place for my family.