Sometime this winter, many of you might wonder: What's the least it would cost to skip town and head to a Caribbean resort, leaving behind scarves, snowbanks and sniffling co-workers?
The wily Internet will sense your desperation (or at least your recent search for "flu remedies") and beckon you with cheap deals promising sand and sun for a pittance.
Those packages will sound mighty good, and really cheap, but are they actually either? I certainly never believed they could be as good as promised, but in service of the shivering souls of New York City and beyond, I decided to call the Web's digital bluff, search for the absolute cheapest all-inclusive Caribbean package — and then actually go. Any beach on any island would do. Just show me the lack of money.
I started with three sites that offer affordable packages: Groupon Getaways, Liberty Travel and CheapCaribbean.com as well as another, Travelzoo, that compiles deals from those and others. After searching and re-searching, shaving down the price as far as I could go, I declared a winner: four days and three nights for $561.86 via CheapCaribbean.com. The site of my late-October escape? The Viva Wyndham Dominicus Beach in Bayahibe, Dominican Republic. (It was not one of CheapCaribbean's featured packages, by the way — I had to dig really deep, tailoring my own vacation and playing with dates.)
That price, I think you'll agree, is suspiciously low, especially because it included airfare, airport transfers, a standard room, meals and whatever else "all-inclusive" includes. Surely Viva Wyndham would try to nickel and dime me once I arrived. I vowed to keep the total cost under $600, even if it involved suffering.
It did not. The beach was palm-saturated and fine-sanded; the water, pastel-colored and just cool enough to refresh. The food was tolerable and certainly plentiful. Alcohol — this was where I was sure they would get me — was free. My room, with a king-size bed and perfectly acceptable bathroom, was maybe about Holiday Inn-level, which is better than I'm used to. Including the $14.50 it cost me to and from Kennedy Airport by subway and AirTrain, $9 in four tips I handed out to drivers and luggage toters and a $5 bottle of Barceló Añejo rum, my total cost came to $590.36, door to door.
It's true that I did not go during high season, and prices go up during the winter months. But I went alone, so couples and groups sharing rooms can expect to make some of that difference back. (For added savings, get a ride to the airport and put up with well drinks.)
It was also all very, very easy. My trips are usually whole-grain adventures, in which I trade discomfort and cultural risk-taking for memorable adventures and personal growth. This was Wonder Bread travel: easy on the palate if not altogether healthy.
I was met at the Santo Domingo airport by a guy with a CheapCaribbean.com clipboard and a van. (First time that's ever happened to me in this job.) He dropped off two couples at other resorts before dropping me off at Viva Wyndham, where we arrived in about 90 minutes, just before noon. (I had taken the earliest possible flight offered in the package.) At reception, they told me I would not be able to check in until 3 p.m., but I could leave my luggage, change in a public bathroom and get onto the beach.
I made a brief stop at the poolside bar on the way, gawking at the crowd of all ages, some of whom seemed to be on their second or third bright pink Singapore Sling of the day. The sun was blazing, merengue music was pumping, children were frolicking, a man with a big belly was drinking a Presidente beer in the pool. I flip-flopped over to the beach, which was protected by palm trees of two distinct heights to create a solid (and particularly paradisiacal) backdrop.
Then I noticed something odd — most people were speaking Italian. I'd find out later that the resort's president is Italian, and that Italian tourists tend to dominate year round. This made making friends — and avoiding secondhand smoke — a bit more challenging. An informal survey suggested that Chileans made up the second largest subset, with Americans and French tied for a distant third.
I wandered the resort, investigating what was included and what was not. Massages started at $35, snorkeling trips at $50. Both were out. Agents from outside travel companies staffed desks selling excursions, also not for me. A mini-mall, and not all that mini, had shops full of beachwear and touristy knickknacks. No need for any of that. The beach was my goal, and when sand and surf and a Kindle full of books got dull, I took out a free kayak or joined a pickup volleyball game.
Or ate and drank. That first day, when lunch started at 12:30, I was prepared for the worst. I had checked the resort's Web site, and without booking a package my room would have cost just $80 a night. That money had to cover the pools, the beach, the landscaping, the staff. How it could also include three decent meals a day was beyond my mathematical capabilities.
Unless it had something to do with those "irrational numbers" we learned about in high school, because quite irrationally, the food was just fine. If you're used to surviving on burned toast at hostel breakfasts and free appetizers at happy hours, this was a smorgasbord: salad bar, cold cuts, fresh bread, rice and beans, baked fish, sliced ham, a pizza bar, a pasta bar, an antipasto bar (yay, Italians!), even a "diet corner." Coffee and fresh fruit juice for breakfast; soda and beer and wine on self-serve taps for lunch and dinner.
Sure, there were weaknesses: I've had better cakes from Hostess, and the broccoli covered in cheese sauce was nauseating. But the watercress at the salad bar had some real bite, the warm sugar-dusted doughnuts at breakfast were irresistible, and the pasta served up fresh by a friendly cook was surprisingly al dente. Anyone who expected more for the price, please direct complaints to the nearest mirror.
(At dinner, you could also make reservations at several other restaurants; two were free and others cost $10 extra.)
All-inclusive places usually try to make a nod or two to the local culture, allaying visitors' guilt that they are in a foreign country whose cultural attractions they are ignoring. So painters were out hawking their bright, tropical canvases, and a store sold Dominican rum and cigars. (I actually bought my bottle at a slight discount from a grocery store in town.) The snack bar featured the spiced-up ground-beef patties and shredded cabbage that connoisseurs of Dominican street food in New York will recognize as the basis of the chimi, or Dominican-style burger. The bars served mamajuana, a Dominican drink of roots and herbs steeped in rum and wine.
Dominicans are all about music — they are largely responsible for the popular tropical rhythms of merengue and bachata — so there were goofy, fun dance lessons in both genres, as well as salsa. There were also nods to the Italians: one side of the main poolside bar was set up for espresso drinks. "As good as at home," said one Italian man I chatted with. That was delusional, but they were tolerable, especially for the bargain price of $0. The rest of the bar served sugary tropical drinks made with cheapo liquor and cloying, artificial-tasting fruit juices. But no one complained, especially when cocktails were served with fist bumps from the hard-working bartenders. (And I solved the problem with that bottle of rum, which I used to spike the self-serve Coke.)
There was also a variety show of sorts every night, the same sort of thing you might see at Club Meds or other resort chains, or so I've been told. I had assiduously avoided this silliness until rain on the final day drove me to seek distraction.
I perked up a bit at the opening announcement, which was delivered in Italian, French and then finally tortured English: "We just remember you that the show is just for adults." Five couples were called up and seated on cushions, and then, in game show format, asked to perform tasks involving balloon-popping, sticking broomsticks through toilet paper tubes and the like, in ways I will describe simply as highly suggestive. My initial reaction was, "This is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it." And then I couldn't stop laughing. For a vacationing crowd with no language in common, it was lowest-common-denominator hilarious.
I had scheduled my return flight for 7:45 p.m., hoping for a full last day in the sun, but instead we got socked with the torrential rains that would become Hurricane Sandy. Aside from guest rooms, no place was safe from the rain — even the dining room flooded. In fact, just as the staff moved merengue lessons to the indoor stage, the ceiling cracked and water poured (amusingly) on the dancers' heads.
The resort was awash and the day was a wash. But oddly enough, I couldn't have been happier. What had I lost? Elsewhere in the Caribbean, I imagined, disappointed travelers had paid $600 a night for some high-end room that maybe included breakfast. I had paid less for the entire trip.
Since I had kept expectations as low as the cost, they were met long before the rain started falling.
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