Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites Merida La Isla by IHG

We ended up leaving the hotel because we felt totally unsafe after being moved to a room on the top floor, tucked away in a corner. We’d asked for a different room after an unsettling incident: someone knocked, said a sentence in Spanish, and walked off. The front desk told us he was the housekeeping manager, but while every employee wore a uniform, he didn’t. Later we saw the same person walking down the street, which made us uncomfortable. We also ate at the restaurant twice, and both times the food gave us diarrhea. This place wasn’t worth the money.

I wish there’d been a pool, though there is a full gym. I stayed because I had a friend in the hospital nearby, and the hotel was close, felt safe, and sat across from a great mall. The staff were incredible, the meals were good, and the bed linens were excellent. I’d recommend it.

People were kind and the location across from the mall is convenient. But if you need to work out, avoid this hotel. The gym is awful: it’s tiny, enclosed in the garage with no natural light, and missing weights, a bench, and machines. I asked for towels, but none arrived over three days.

I booked hoping for a place to relax after a weekend of travel, and this didn’t work for that. The larger building in the pictures is office space, so there’s nowhere to unwind around the hotel apart from a small, industrial-looking room and a very small lobby. We ended up spending time at the mall across the street. Finding parking in the underground garage during a workday was a challenge. This Holiday Inn shares a building with a much larger office complex and feels set up for business travel, not tourism. The booking site listed continental or American breakfast as an amenity, but the charge was exorbitant. The pool listing only said there was no hot tub, which was confusing when there wasn’t even a pool picture. I wish the hotel had been described more accurately.