A loyal RIU guest's first real disappointment, and it's a big one
After years of staying at RIU hotels across many destinations, I always left wanting to come back. That loyalty is exactly why this is so hard to write.
We arrived at Riu Playacar to start our family vacation and were checked into a room with no running water at all — no water in the sink, and no water in the toilet, meaning no way to flush or wash hands after using the bathroom. For a family with kids, that's not a minor inconvenience; it's a basic sanitation failure at a hotel that calls itself 5-star.
The worst part isn't that a water outage happened — things break. It's that the hotel was already without water when we checked in, and they checked us in anyway, knowing the room was unusable, with no estimate for repair. We hauled up all our luggage, settled the family in, then sat for hours with no water and no answers, told only that it was "something extraordinary."
To their credit, they relocated us to a sister property the same day. But that meant repacking everything we'd just unpacked and moving an entire family with all our bags, after losing our arrival day to a problem they knew about before we walked in. A simple heads-up and an offer to relocate at check-in would have turned a disaster into a minor inconvenience.
I genuinely wanted to keep coming back to RIU. After this, I won't. This is the end of a long run as a loyal guest — and that's a shame, because it was entirely avoidable.
