Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun Vacation Review

The Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun is a Mexican beach resort located south of Cancun in the Puerto Morelos principality. If you have never been to a Hyatt Ziva or Zilara property, they are a vacation within themselves. These are upscale all-inclusive properties that are still accessible to most everyone from a cost perspective. The following is a Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun vacation review from October 2021.

While the resort used to be a Sandals property, it had been vacant for several years. The Hyatt Ziva brand purchased the property and remodeled the resort. The resort had just opened in mid-September 2021, so everything still had a new feel to it. At all-inclusive resorts, the resort is the whole vacation for a large portion of visitors. Therefore, I try to go into great detail for my reviews. What follows is the first part of a four-part review of the resort:

1. Hotel Review (including Guest Room Overview)
2. Restaurant Review
3. Bar Review
4. Amenities Review

Location

The Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun is located just south of Cancun. While many of the hotels in Cancun are located in the Hotel Zone, this Hyatt all-inclusive resort is not located here. This means it is away from the hustle and bustle of the Hotel Zone. If you like the hustle and bustle, busy beaches, and nearby off-property restaurants and activities, try one of the Hyatt all-inclusives in the Hotel Zone. However, if you want a more secluded resort, try the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun. While the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun does have a couple of other resorts nearby, you almost never see them or their guests.

The Ziva Riviera Cancun is located a 20-minute drive south of the Cancun airport. This makes it about the same length ride from the airport as resorts within the Hotel Zone (which takes between 15 and 25 minutes). This makes for an easy trip after the completion of your flight. It also means you can find inexpensive transfers from the airport to the resort.

Pool View Junior Suite Double Guest Room

Entry

Upon first stepping into the Pool View Junior Suite Double room, the main hall/entryway of the suite greets you. To the left is a large bank of closets. Within this bank of closets are plenty of space for hanging clothes, shelves for folded clothes, an in-room four-digit combination safe, two robes, two pairs of slippers, an iron, and an ironing board. A large amount of space is nice, but otherwise, there isn’t too much special about the setup.

Bathroom

On the left side of the room is the large bathroom. The bathroom starts with a spacious double vanity. There is a large amount of countertop space around the sinks and an even larger lighted mirror above the vanity. The bathroom comes stocked with several toiletries in case you left any of yours at home. The provided toiletries include:

• Toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash
• Razor and shaving cream
• Shampoo
• Conditioner
• Body wash
• Bar soap
• Lotion
• Nail files, Q-tips, Cotton swabs

The sink space also provides a makeup mirror, scale, and hairdryer for your use. Finally, glasses and bottles of water are provided daily.

Moving around the bathroom brings you to the toilet. It has its own room which provides privacy and separation from the rest of the room. Besides this separation, there isn’t too much else special about this.

Next up is the large shower in the corner of the bathroom. Large is an understatement as this shower was probably the size of many urban house’s/apartment’s whole bathrooms. The finishes in the shower were nice, and the full-length bench provided a great place to prop up your feet and legs while in the shower. Additionally, the bench also served as a place to put toiletries since the shower niche was small. Unfortunately, the water temperature did have a habit of alternating between warm and hot during all showers. I don’t know what the cause of the fluctuations was, but it did make for some uncomfortable temperatures.

The final part of the bathroom was the jacuzzi tub. The jacuzzi was large enough for two people. Immediately behind the jacuzzi was a sliding door that opened the bathroom to the rest of the room and the resort view beyond. I have to imagine this could be a nice way to relax during the evening. Unfortunately, I have to just imagine since I never checked out the jacuzzi for myself.

Bedroom Area

Moving further into the guest room is the sleeping area. While I had originally booked a king room, they had overbooked this category. I instead ended up with a double room. While this worked for us, I was disappointed in not being able to get the room I booked. The beds were comfortable. If you like soft pillows, they will also be to your liking. I generally prefer more firm or foam pillows, so I had a harder time sleeping on them. Each side of the bed headboard also had a reading light built into it.

A bedside table was located between the two beds. The table provided space for a phone and alarm clock. Additionally, just behind the bedside table were the thermostat, outlet, and light switches for the room. Unfortunately, the outlet above the bedside table was the only outlet near the beds. If you like to have your phone near the bed charging at night, you will only be able to have it on one side of the bed. The only saving grace of the outlet was that it included both regular North American outlets and USB outlets suitable for charging many devices.

In the corner of the room are a table and two chairs suitable for a room service breakfast or doing a small amount of work. The chairs are not particularly comfortable, so I recommend the outdoor balcony seating options. More on those to come in a minute.

The final part of the bedroom area is the drawers, countertop, and television located directly opposite the beds. Drawers run the length of the wall and provide a good place to store folded clothes while at the resort. There is also a low countertop above these drawers that also makes a good place to situate your luggage. In the cabinet to the far left is the mini-fridge and adjacent to it is a snack drawer. Above those are the Nespresso maker, mugs, ice bucket, and glasses. Given that the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun is all-inclusive, all the items in the mini-fridge, snacks, and Nespresso are included in your room rate.

The mini-fridge included Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light (Diet Coke for US drinkers), Sprite, bottled water, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Fitzer (a hard seltzer), and Cristal (club soda). The snacks provided in the room were a little on the light side as they included a bag of chips, a package of peanuts, and a container of Oreo minis. On the other hand, it is hard to criticize the selection when you can go to any restaurant, snack bar, or room service and get whatever you want anytime.

Lastly, the TV was also located on this wall, opposite the beds. The television was a decent size (approximately 50 inches). The hotel provided a decent selection of local and international channels. Many of the cable channels were available in the rooms. Some of the traditional local channels (like CBS, NBC, and FOX) were also in the room, but they were not playing standard American content. While there isn’t anything wrong with this, it’s just helpful to know this if, for example, you are planning to watch a US sporting event that comes on one of these channels during your stay.

Balcony

Finally, what beach resort room would be complete without a balcony to enjoy the tropical outdoors? Each room had its own balcony; however, the privacy of which was highly dependent on the room location. While none of the balconies were truly private, rooms with resort/pool views and especially rooms at the end of buildings adjoining others were not private at all. Our room fell into the latter category. That meant anyone walking the hallway of the adjacent building to ours, looked directly into our balcony. While this probably meant that we used it less, it still was a great place to enjoy a little downtime between events or while waiting to get ready for dinner/evening activities.

Obviously, the oceanfront rooms will have a better view and more privacy. While it is probably worth a few extra dollars on the room rate for this location, if you don’t spend much time in your room like I do, you can just walk to the oceanfront anytime you want.

Each balcony came with a table and two chairs for sitting and eating. If you wanted to get room service for any of your meals, this would make a great location to enjoy it as long as the weather was nice. Additionally, each balcony was outfitted with a day bed. The day bed was surprisingly comfortable and was plenty big to spread out. This tended to be one of my favorite spots to sit and write reviews while I was at the resort.

The one negative for my room location, in particular, was that the day bed was positioned such that it looked at the adjacent building and hallway. Had it been on the other side of the balcony, I could have enjoyed the resort and pool views while doing my writing. I am sure this is a function of the room you get as I imagine rooms on the other side of the resort look in the opposite direction where the balcony layout would be perfect.

Parking

While most people do not rent a car, the resort does provide free parking if you need it. The parking is self-park, and it is located immediately at the front of the hotel. I didn’t utilize the parking during my stay as I booked a transfer to and from the airport with a separate company. Therefore, I can’t really comment on the details of the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun parking situation in this review.

Food and Beverage

Because food and beverage is such a large category for an all-inclusive resort, a separate review is coming for all the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun restaurants and bars in the future week.

Service

For the most part, the service at the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun was great; however, there were a couple of outliers of less than ideal service. The first issue was that the king room I had reserved was overbooked. While the front desk staff did apologize for the situation, there was little done to compensate or attempt to rectify the issue.

This service issue started the trip off on the wrong foot, but luckily it did improve. The service was very accommodating for the remainder of the trip. The housekeeping staff kept the room clean and restocked the toiletries, mini-bar, and snacks regularly. The front desk staff was also very helpful when I inquired about various items throughout my stay.

Finally, it is worth noting that we visited the resort within three weeks of its opening to the public. Construction was still ongoing, but they did well to hide it and not disturb guests during their visit. Some common areas were not yet finished (like the spa shown above or the coffee shop). There were definitely services issues encountered that I would attribute to the newness of the resort. These included some areas that were understaffed and staff who were unfamiliar with some schedules and procedures. I have been to other Hyatt Ziva and Zilara brands in the past that were excellent in these areas. As this hotel is run by the same hotel group (Playa Hotels), I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they will get their service figured out as their staff becomes more experienced.

Amenities

The included amenities are also a big draw for all-inclusive resorts. Therefore, I will provide a review of the amenities provided at Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun in a future post.

Cost

The price of hotels (especially all-inclusive hotels) varies widely based on the season and any sales that may be going on at the time. The Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun is no different. The following will be a few examples of the cost for the base guest room with 2 adults as of October 2021.

One reason that I went to this resort so soon after it was slated to open was due to their grand opening sale that was going on in mid-2021. This sale was pricing their base room at $299/night for double occupancy.

As I search for random mid-December stays (roughly two months out from the time I am writing this), I am seeing average room prices of $400/night for double occupancy. When a sale is not going on, rates across the entire year go as low as $360/night and increase to over $700/night around the Christmas and New Years’ holidays. Most nights are in the $400 – $500/night range. This resort does run a sale once every other month generally. If you are really interested in going, keep your eyes out for one of these. The sales often run for non-peak times such as shoulder seasons, the middle of summer (when it is really hot), or the beginning of fall when hurricane season makes travel unpredictable. If these times are acceptable for you, the sales often take about $100 off the room rate per night.

The final way to stay at this resort is with Hyatt points. This all-inclusive resort runs 25,000 points per night for double occupancy. Each additional occupant in the same room is 12,500 points. This can be a good use of points when the costs are at the upper end of the spectrum (peak travel times, especially around the winter holidays). You could also book a nicer suite for 40,000 points per night. This books an oceanfront, high-floor room. Finally, additional guests per room above two are 12,500 points per night.

Wrap-Up

The Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun is a great all-inclusive resort (hopefully this review showed that). The property is smaller than several of the resorts you will find in the Ziva/Zilara family giving it a more secluded feel. The Hyatt brand also has a couple of resorts in the main Hotel Zone of Cancun. If you prefer to be away from the bustle and crowds of the Hotel Zone in Cancun, this is a resort for you.

While there are definitely nicer Hyatt all-inclusives in the Ziva and Zilara family (like the Ziva/Zilara Cap Cana or Ziva/Zilara Rose Hall), Riviera Cancun is still a nice resort. Work is ongoing to renovate the resort, though they hid the construction quite well. I am sure that the resort will improve as these renovations are wrapped up. Hopefully, this Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun review answered all your questions. If not, leave a comment below, and I will answer them as soon as possible.