Hotel Castillo Huatulco & Beach Club

There weren’t enough staff for the number of guests, so eating or getting a drink at the hotel meant a lot of waiting. There wasn’t enough food or seating either. We brought our own bedding and ate elsewhere for our whole stay. Awful experience, wouldn’t recommend it.

The beach club was calming, and the buffet was great. It’s affordable and well located if you want to visit the public beach. I’d highly recommend it for a holiday with friends or family.

The staff were generally friendly, aside from one serious issue, and the hotel has a rustic feel with plenty of local and returning international guests. It’s centrally located, so walking around the area is easy. The buffet was good, though it used to be better, and the price feels high for what you get. On a bed and breakfast plan, bringing your own drinks into hotel areas can get you approached and charged a fee. The older building is especially dated. We heard parties in the lobby at night, the AC was noisy, the bathroom was musty and moldy with a bad smell, and the sink leaked. There were also holes and cracks in the floors. The owners keep adding room towers without adding bars, restaurants, or buffet capacity. Breakfast was crowded, and we waited at least 15 minutes for a table. The pool was missing lots of tiles, which felt dangerous. The beach club was good, but its pool was tiny and got very crowded. The bathrooms there were dirty because they were overwhelmed. We didn’t use the shuttle, since we wanted to catch the sunset at the beach and the last shuttle had left before sunset began. I might have rated the hotel 3.5 out of 5, but we were robbed in our room by a female hotel worker. My partner and I noticed money missing from our cases midway through the stay. The next day, a suspicious worker came into our room at noon, hours after cleaning had finished. She didn’t knock, just used her master key. When she saw us, she got nervous, but still walked around the bed, saying she had lost a document. She never asked permission to look for it and entered without our consent. We reported this to management and security. They investigated and confirmed from the lock logs that she had entered when she shouldn’t have. But they couldn’t prove she stole the money, so it came down to her word against ours. She was a recent hire and firmly denied taking it. There is CCTV around the hotel, but no camera in the aisle where our room was. So she had entered without permission, but there was no proof of the theft. It’s a shame the hotel took no responsibility, and management did nothing to help us or take action against her.

We stayed for two weeks, Feb 2-16, and this was our second visit. Overall, it was quite good. The food was good, and our room was very good, with a king bed, a nice shower, and a fridge. We liked the beach club food too, especially the clubhouse sandwich, which they still do well. A big bonus was that neither of us got sick. I think we’ll come back.