Iberostar Tucan All Inclusive

Starting off positively, the animals are amazing and the hotel is mostly clean. The rooms are fine. The staff is friendly. The negative: checking into the hotel is very tedious. We booked online and even “checked in” online, and the website said all we would have to do is show ID at reception and pick up our key cards. Nope, it actually took 30 mins - 1 hour because the employee kept trying to upsell on everything. He sat us down for 45 mins to talk about upgrades, extra services, VIP areas, etc. Just trying to get us to spend more money. When you get to a hotel after hours of traveling, you just want to head to your room ASAP and relax. But no, they waste an hour of your time trying to get more money from you (after you already paid a lot of money for this resort). I do not blame the employee for it, he probably has to do this, but this should really be changed. Second, you have to have a reservation to do pretty much anything here in the evening. There were 3 empty pool tables, so we wanted to play. We were told we needed to make a reservation for tomorrow. What? A reservation for a pool table? The same goes for restaurants. You either have to eat at the buffet (the food there is mid, but that is to be expected), or you have to make a reservation for the next day. And if you’re late for your reservation, you have to pay a fine. When I’m on a relaxing vacation, I don’t wanna have to worry about reservations and fines (especially for arbitrary things like pool tables). It’s an all inclusive resort, it should be first come first serve. And there definitely shouldn’t be a fine for guests who are already paying a lot of money to be there. There are a bunch of arbitrary rules like this, such as the bar closing at 10pm and you have to go to a different bar in the lobby. Why? Then, the activities. We had booked a snorkeling tour, but it got canceled because the water was bad. Then we were offered to do a different activity, but when we said we just wanted our money back, they were VERY difficult about it. Once again we had to waste 30 mins of our time, simply to get a refund for a service that was not provided. They literally kept refusing to give us a refund and kept offering other activities/vouchers that we did not want. This is once again not a good way to treat your well paying guests. After a lot of struggle we were finally able to get our refund, but it really shouldn’t be this hard. The woman working there was very annoyed with us for simply asking a refund. Then, the beach. It is advertised as a private beach but it is not. There are constantly random people on the “private” beach trying to sell you things, including substances. It gives an unsafe feeling. Maybe the hotel can’t do anything about this, but in that case they shouldn’t advertise it as a private beach in my opinion. There are a lot of families with children here and they might be blissfully unaware of this, but because we are young people we were constantly approached by people trying to sell substances (sometimes quite aggressively). If you are traveling with children/family, I would recommend not coming here OR only staying inside and using the hotel pool (but not the beach). Again, it feels unsafe. All in all, the hotel is very pretty and the animals are cute. The staff is hard working and friendly. But the amount of dumb rules, reservations, unsafe beach, and CONSTANT upselling/trying to take money from you, is a huge reason for me not to recommend this hotel.