Do You Love Waiting in Line on Vacation?
Back in the day, most all-inclusive resorts managed their a la carte dining experiences by requiring reservations. Have you experienced that?
They offered a nightly buffet, and an additional 4-5 a la carte restaurants.
You checked into the resort, and if you stayed 5 nights you had 3 nights of included a la carte dinner options. The other two nights you ate at the buffet.
Well, in order to make those three nights of dinner reservations you had to wait in line. Sometimes for hours.
I can’t tell you how many times I waited in line, only to be told the restaurant I wanted was already full on the night I wanted to eat there. Usually, I was told that restaurant was full during my entire stay. I was also frequently told that all of the other a la carte restaurants were also full that night, no matter what time I was willing to have dinner.
How was that possible when everyone had to make reservations the same day?
It doesn’t matter, because these days none of the resorts I recommend limit a la carte dining.
The best resorts now have enough seating at their a la carte restaurants to accommodate all their customers. My favorites don’t even offer a dinner buffet unless it’s a “special” event, like the Surf and Turf evening around the pool offered at my favorite resort in Cancun on Friday evenings.
The one exception to this are the teppanyaki tables at resort Asian restaurants. Those do require reservations simply because of the limited seating.
The uneducated traveler sees the beautiful pictures of resorts online and assumes they are all pretty much the same. They see a list of included dining options (Asian, Italian, French, Steakhouse, Caribbean, etc.) and assume they will have unlimited access to any of those. It’s shocking when they arrive and discover it’s not handled the way it was presented online.
The devil is always in the details, and sometimes the details mean you’ll be spending hours every day waiting in line trying to get a reservation for an a la carte dinner at your resort.
I am sure no one reading this wants to spend a single minute of their upcoming vacation waiting in line for anything, much less a dinner reservation. Stick with the resorts that want to deliver an amazing experience, not ones that cut corners by driving you to their evening buffet.