Image via Excellence Resorts
Choosing our honeymoon proved to be a very difficult task for us. While Mr. Jet and I do have very similar ideas about how we wanted to spend our honeymoon, the options seemed nearly limitless and trying to narrow me down to anything should be an Olympic sport.
We figured we should choose somewhere in the Caribbean, since it wouldn't be more than a 5-6 hour flight to most places from Boston and the weather would be really warm in October. We were a go until we realized that we're hitting the tail end of hurricane season in most of the Caribbean. Oops.
We looked at Aruba first, since they are kind of tucked into the west side of the Caribbean and rarely see hurricanes. We met with a travel agent at AAA to discuss options, but were sorely disappointed when we realized our dollar would not go very far there. The resorts we liked were way out of our price range, even for the most basic room. This was our honeymoon, we wanted to travel in style and have a view like the one above!
I went back to the proverbial drawing board (TripAdvisor) for some more tropical options where we could live like kings for a week.
Our must-haves were:
-Beach
-Warm
-All-Inclusive
-Good Food
-Laziness
-But not too much laziness, we wanted optional excursions if we get bored
-Spa Services
-Adults Only
I asked Mr. Jet to pick his top two absolutes from this list and we both decided that Beach + Food = ULTIMATE. I started trolling TripAdvisor reviews and message boards to find top rated All-Inclusive resorts that actually offered good food. In the All-Inclusive world, these two things don't often go hand in hand. I stumbled upon the Excellence Group and checked out their website to get the low-down on what they offered. Their resort in Playa Mujeres jumped out as a more modern, adults-only retreat with what they consider "Gourmet" All-Inclusive. I read about 150 reviews for this resort and it seemed to really live up to its name in terms of service and value. It wasn't the cheapest resort in Mexico, but it looked like the one for us! I even read some WeddingBee reviews (as well as Pengy's recaps!) and it seemed like it would be our perfect newlywed retreat.
I checked with my company's travel agent to see if she could crunch the numbers for us, it was definitely within our budget, and see that photo above? Oh yeah, that's a two-story rooftop suite with private plunge pool! It checked off every box on our list and then some. This resort boasts 9 restaurants, 11 bars, daily activities, nightly entertainment, optional excursions, only a half-hour from Cancun, a nice (but small, I hear) stretch of beach and 24-hour room service. We are taking a chance hitting the tail end of hurricane season, but mid-October seems to be fairly safe according to the seasonal reviews I read. ::fingers crossed!:: To be on the safe side, we bought travel insurance through my company's travel agent so we weren't SOL come October.
We'll be spending 7 glorious nights in paradise, drinking things out of pineapples and eating so much we'll need to purchase extra seats to get home.
Anyone else heading to the Caribbean for their post-wedding getaway??
We figured we should choose somewhere in the Caribbean, since it wouldn't be more than a 5-6 hour flight to most places from Boston and the weather would be really warm in October. We were a go until we realized that we're hitting the tail end of hurricane season in most of the Caribbean. Oops.
We looked at Aruba first, since they are kind of tucked into the west side of the Caribbean and rarely see hurricanes. We met with a travel agent at AAA to discuss options, but were sorely disappointed when we realized our dollar would not go very far there. The resorts we liked were way out of our price range, even for the most basic room. This was our honeymoon, we wanted to travel in style and have a view like the one above!
I went back to the proverbial drawing board (TripAdvisor) for some more tropical options where we could live like kings for a week.
Our must-haves were:
-Beach
-Warm
-All-Inclusive
-Good Food
-Laziness
-But not too much laziness, we wanted optional excursions if we get bored
-Spa Services
-Adults Only
I asked Mr. Jet to pick his top two absolutes from this list and we both decided that Beach + Food = ULTIMATE. I started trolling TripAdvisor reviews and message boards to find top rated All-Inclusive resorts that actually offered good food. In the All-Inclusive world, these two things don't often go hand in hand. I stumbled upon the Excellence Group and checked out their website to get the low-down on what they offered. Their resort in Playa Mujeres jumped out as a more modern, adults-only retreat with what they consider "Gourmet" All-Inclusive. I read about 150 reviews for this resort and it seemed to really live up to its name in terms of service and value. It wasn't the cheapest resort in Mexico, but it looked like the one for us! I even read some WeddingBee reviews (as well as Pengy's recaps!) and it seemed like it would be our perfect newlywed retreat.
I checked with my company's travel agent to see if she could crunch the numbers for us, it was definitely within our budget, and see that photo above? Oh yeah, that's a two-story rooftop suite with private plunge pool! It checked off every box on our list and then some. This resort boasts 9 restaurants, 11 bars, daily activities, nightly entertainment, optional excursions, only a half-hour from Cancun, a nice (but small, I hear) stretch of beach and 24-hour room service. We are taking a chance hitting the tail end of hurricane season, but mid-October seems to be fairly safe according to the seasonal reviews I read. ::fingers crossed!:: To be on the safe side, we bought travel insurance through my company's travel agent so we weren't SOL come October.
We'll be spending 7 glorious nights in paradise, drinking things out of pineapples and eating so much we'll need to purchase extra seats to get home.
Anyone else heading to the Caribbean for their post-wedding getaway??
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