Hotel Review: Hampton Inn Cancun - Great Staff – In Downtown Not in Beach Zone

Victor, David and the rest of the front desk staff were always friendly and helpful with suggestions on places to eat, things to do and making sure taxis were always available to take us to our early morning excursion meeting points.

The rooms were clean.  But they are too small for a rollaway bed.  When you have parents and two teenage boys, one boy will probably be sleeping on the floor by choice.  They did provide us with extra blankets and sheets and comforters for the floor but while rough, it never convinced the boys to share the bed.  It would have been great if the hotel had a small cot or something, especially if you brought Grandma along.

The breakfast was your basic free Hampton Inn breakfast: make your own waffle, toast, cereal, and fruit but they did include a couple of hot plates with potatoes and eggs.

The Hampton Inn is in a new shopping area called La Roca. The hotel is so new (three months old) most taxi drivers didn’t know where it was.  However, they all knew where La Roca was.  The shopping area has a brand new movie theater with first run movies (we watched Wonder Woman for 70 pesos = $4), good inexpensive restaurants from pizza to Mexican to Sushi to a TGI Fridays, and a Suprema grocery store and Sam’s Club all within a block of each other. 

View of La Roca from hotel

The only drawback of the Hampton Inn is that it is nowhere near beach or water access. If your dreams of Cancun are spending your days laying on a beach all day drinking Pina Coladas, this is not for you. But if you want a clean friendly hotel with free breakfast surrounded by good inexpensive food as a base for your excursions, I recommend the Hampton Inn.

The way we planned it was to stay here at the beginning of our trip and do our major excursions to Xcaret and Chichen Itza then move on to a beach hotel to drink those Pina Coladas.

Note: At the time of this review the Hampton Inn is the only Hilton property in Cancun.  It opened in April. So if you have a free weekend night certificate through the Hilton credit cards or points to use, you now have a place to stay in Cancun.

Cancun Part 2 - Using the Hotel Certificates

Now that we were armed with our points and certificates we booked the hotels first.  The reason being hotel nights can be canceled with no penalties up to 24 hours to a week before hand.  Airlines however tend to have "no cancellation" policies, so if the flights did not work we could always move the hotel days or even the vacation destination. 

First we booked, the Hyatt_Ziva for four nights.  This hotel looks amazing on the web site, has great reviews, and more importantly is all-inclusive so I do not have to worry about a massive food bill from feeding two teenage boys. Looking at the Hyatt website, the prices in June run $906 per night!

Hyatt Ziva from cancun.ziva.hyatt.com

Being so amazing, we were fortunate that we were able to book four nights that fit into our vacation plans.

The Hilton's reward_program is a little trickier.  As mentioned in last week's post, the certificate's have to be used with a category one 1-to-4 hotel and used on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday night.

In January 2017, when I first looked Hilton had no hotels in Cancun. Amazing, I know.

But on April 1, a Hampton_Inn opened in downtown Cancun.  Not only was it part of the Hilton family of hotels, it was a category 2 hotel.

Hampton Inn Cancun from hamptoninn3.hilton.com

I immediately called and booked three nights (Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I also used 23,000 points I already earned to book the fourth night - Monday night.

I could have booked the Ziva Monday through Thursday night and then the Hampton Inn the Friday night before we left if I wanted to only use certificates to book our stays, but for me, it was not worth the hassle to switch hotels. Even if I didn't have enough points, the Hampton Inn as of this writing was relatively inexpensive at $104.00 per night and I would have paid for the one night versus lugging our stuff between hotels on our last day.

So, while the Hampton Inn was not as an amazing deal as the Hyatt Ziva, I feel paying $200 for four nights in Cancun is still a deal. It even includes free breakfast.  Our plan is to do most of our traveling while we're at the Hampton Inn and laze around when we're at the Ziva.

Next week: booking the flights - patience