A confession

I used to love all-inclusive resorts. For a decade, my partner and I booked at least one a year — the kind with the wristband, the lobby bar, the six restaurants you never quite made it to all of, and the pool scene straight out of a 1990s spring-break movie. They were easy. They were predictable. And on the surface, they felt like good value.

Then we stayed at Casa Chanty for the first time, and I haven’t booked a resort since.

This isn’t a hit piece. There are great reasons to book a resort, and I’ll get to them. But after four years of private villa rentals in the Riviera Maya, I now find the resort experience genuinely difficult to enjoy. Here’s why, in detail, with honest numbers.

The all-inclusive pitch — and the lie

The pitch is simple. You pay one price, and everything is included. Food, drinks, entertainment, kids’ club, gym, beach access, the daily 4pm pool volleyball game. The brochure shows a couple in matching white linen, holding cocktails, staring lovingly at a turquoise sea. It’s aspirational. It works.

The reality, in my experience, is a slow accumulation of small disappointments. The three buffet restaurants that all serve variations of the same rice and chicken. The watered-down drinks (you can usually taste the well liquor). The pool packed with two hundred other guests, each defending their lounger with a towel placed at 7am. The 7am breakfast rush. The 6pm dinner queue for the one “good” restaurant on site. The nightly entertainment that’s exactly as good as you remember from the high school talent show.

None of this is catastrophic. None of it ruins the trip. But the gap between the brochure and the experience, repeated over a week, leaves a residue of mild dissatisfaction that I now recognise as the all-inclusive tax. You don’t feel it in the moment. You feel it on the flight home, when you realise you can’t quite remember anything that made the trip feel special.

What a private villa actually gives you

Switch to a private villa rental and the calculus flips. Here’s what changes, in roughly the order I noticed it:

Privacy, real privacy

At a resort, you’re sharing with two hundred to two thousand other guests. The pool is communal. The beach has the resort’s logo on the loungers. The buffet is a parade. At a villa, your group is the only group. The pool is yours. The beach is yours. The morning sounds are the wind in the palms, not the speaker stack at the aqua-aerobics class. For couples, this is a luxury. For families with teenagers, it’s the difference between a relaxing holiday and a refereeing job. For groups of friends, it’s the only way to do it.

Space

A resort room is a resort room: a bed, a bathroom, a balcony, maybe thirty-five square metres. A villa is a home. Casa Chanty’s Sun Suite has a full kitchen, a dining room, a living room, three bedrooms, a wraparound terrace, and a private entrance. The Penthouse adds a loft. You can have dinner together in the shared outdoor kitchen and retire to your own apartment for the night. No hallway traffic. No door slamming. No luggage Tetris.

A real kitchen

This is the under-appreciated one. A real kitchen changes how you eat on holiday. You can have breakfast when you want, where you want. The kids can have snacks. The morning coffee is a coffee, not a packet from the buffet. And if you do the grocery shop on day one (Andrea at Casa Chanty will arrange it before you arrive), the cost of feeding a family of four for a week is roughly what you’d pay in surcharges and tips at a resort.

The food, when you want it

When you don’t want to cook, Casa Chanty’s Chef Beto service is the move. He’s been cooking in the Riviera Maya for over twenty years and turns out a seven-course tasting menu of Yucatán-Mediterranean fusion. A dinner for six, including wine pairings, runs about $80 USD per person — about what you’d spend on a mediocre dinner-for-two at a resort’s specialty restaurant, with a hundredth of the noise.

There’s also a home-cook option: a local cook prepares your main meal Monday through Friday, three hours a day, and leaves the kitchen clean. $250 USD for the full five days. I’ve done this on longer trips. It’s the closest thing to a working holiday that still feels like a holiday.

The beach, as it should be

The resort beach is a managed experience. Loungers, umbrellas, beach waiters, sargassum-cleaning crews, designated swim zones, and the constant low-level hum of organised fun. A villa beach is what the brochures actually showed. At Casa Chanty, the sand is in front of you, the water is in front of you, and the nearest other person is in the next villa down the beach. You can walk for an hour and not see another footprint.

The cost comparison — honest numbers

The “all-in” pitch implies the alternative is expensive. It isn’t, usually, when you run the numbers honestly. Here’s a worked example for a week in the Riviera Maya, mid-range, two adults:

Resort, two adults, 7 nights

Mid-range all-inclusive (think Dreams, Iberostar, similar): $350-450 per night for a standard room in high season. Total: $2,500-3,200. Add airport transfer ($80 round trip), tips ($100+ for the week — at an all-inclusive, you tip the bartender, the waiter, the housekeeping, the pool guy), and one or two off-resort excursions ($200-400), and you’re at $3,000-3,800 before you’ve bought sunscreen.

Villa, two adults, 7 nights

Same dates at Casa Chanty’s Sun Suite: $2,200-2,800 depending on the week. Includes a full kitchen, a private terrace, beach access, a private pool, daily housekeeping on request, and a concierge. Add a private airport transfer ($120 round trip), one grocery shop ($150 for a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and snacks), and one chef dinner ($160 for the pair), and you’re at $2,800-3,200. The villa is comparable in price and includes things the resort charges extra for.

Now run the same numbers for a group of eight

Eight adults at a mid-range resort: $4,000-6,000 per night in high season. Total: $28,000-42,000 for the week. Painful. Eight adults at Casa Chanty, taking the entire property: $12,000-15,000 for the week. Less than half. The math swings harder the bigger the group gets, and it’s the main reason multi-generational family trips and friend reunions have quietly moved from resorts to villas over the last decade.

Who should still book a resort

I want to be honest about this, because not every traveller is the same. Resorts still win for:

  • First-time visitors who want everything handled, who don’t speak Spanish, and who don’t want to think about logistics for seven days.
  • Honeymooners who want pure relaxation, poolside spa services, and the romance of being waited on.
  • Anyone with very young children who’ll spend every waking hour in the kids’ club and water park anyway. (For older kids and teens, I’d argue the villa is better.)
  • People who want to be social and meet other travellers. The villa is a quieter, more inward-facing experience.

The verdict

If you’re the kind of traveller who values quiet, food, space, and the freedom to set your own schedule, the villa wins. It’s not even close, in my experience. The all-inclusive pitch is built on convenience, but the convenience comes with a string of small compromises that, over a week, add up to a less relaxing holiday than the one you imagined.

Casa Chanty is a particularly good example of why. The layout — three separate residences in one villa — means you get the privacy of an apartment with the togetherness of a shared house. The location — on a quiet stretch of beach with no neighbours, no crowds, no sargassum-flag-marked swim zones — means the beach experience is the real thing. The team — Andrea, Chef Beto, Juan the driver — means you get the concierge service of a resort, but with a personal touch you don’t get from a uniformed staff.

It’s not for everyone. Nothing is. But for me, and for a growing number of travellers I know, the switch was permanent. I haven’t booked a resort in four years. I doubt I’ll book one again.