Nickelodeon Hotels & Resorts Punta Cana by Karisma

Overall, we had a fun vacation. However, there were several frustrating things that I wanted to make other travelers aware of as they consider this location. Our grandsons (7 and 9) loved seeing the characters and doing all of the activities. There was very little communication related to the activities and character meet and greet opportunities, only on their app. The food was not as catered to kids as we expected and there were NO snacks in the room for the kids. There were a couple bags of really bad tasting chips and some drinks, but that was it. They really should have more snacks in the room and more kid friendly food options at the restaurants. The larger water slides at Aqua Nick are virtually hidden and there was zero signage or information about them. We found this whole area only by asking. And it is a bit of a walk from the main water park area. When you get to this new area with the taller slides, it's quite lovely and very quiet (maybe because no one knows about it), but there is no food or drink station back there. This is also very inconvenient. We had to grab a waiter and offer tips for him to make trips to us with drinks throughout the day when we were in that area. They really should invest in another food and drink station in the back water park. Unfortunately, there was a LOT of seaweed in the ocean that had also piled up on the beach. This pile of seaweed drew many bugs, and the smell was very unpleasant. So, we were not able to enjoy the beach at all during the entire week of our vacation. There was no attempt by the resort to have the seaweed on the beach removed or cleaned up, which was extremely disappointing. The worst thing we dealt with that we heard many other guests complain about as well, the lack of air conditioning in the rooms. One of our rooms had no A/C the whole first day and my daughter and her family had to move rooms. Even that room, the air only worked partially and there was a limit to the temperature that they could set the thermostat to for some reason. Others had the same issues, which seemed to be a common complaint while we were there. The activities were fun, the characters were fun, there is a lot to do, and the facility was clean. The bartenders and waiters/waitresses were all very nice and hospitable. Many of the other workers spoke little to no English, which was a little frustrating at times. We were not greeted on arrival with a drink (as we later learned we should have been) and a no-show of the bell hop to bring our luggage to the front for checkout. Those little things would have made a big difference. The lack of a little extra hospitality that we've experienced at other all-inclusive resorts was noticeably absent and missed.

We stayed for five nights in early June 2025. Weather/environment - Excellent. The high was around 85F every day. It rained a couple of times, but never for very long. It’s in a beautiful area, a 40 minute drive west along the coast from Punta Cana airport. Check-in - Straightforward. Adults get orange NFC wristbands that are your room key and a way to charge purchases to your room. Kids don’t need one. The hotel doesn’t keep a credit card on file; you’re charged for everything when you check out, and you can use a different card than the one you booked with if you want. The wristbands themselves weren’t great. They’re rubber, so in the heat and humidity, they get uncomfortable quickly. You also have to mush them on the door lock for a few seconds before they’ll work, most of the time. After a few days, right when we were coming back from an excursion and were hot and tired, they didn’t work at all and I had to trudge back to the lobby to replace them. Thankfully, you don’t have to wear a band at all times to “prove” you’re a guest. They charge $150 if you lose one, though. Right when you check in, you’re assigned a “personal concierge” which is advertised as the way for you to book restaurants and priced add-ons. You can text or WhatsApp them. They have an ulterior motive, though. Staff - If you speak Spanish you’ll be in good shape to communicate with everyone. If you speak English, you should still be able to talk to most staff as long as you avoid figures of speech. The one time I had to communicate with someone who didn’t speak English, Google Translate worked well enough. Attitudes were all over the place. Most were friendly, but some staff looked and acted like they really didn’t want to be there. Same as any resort, really. Still, even the grumpy ones were very nice to my daughter. They really tried to make kids feel special. She’s learning Spanish, and they appreciated her efforts to speak to them in their language. Be careful booking anything that costs extra with the personal concierge, because they will try to rope you into a sales presentation to subsidize it. If you’re there with a partner, you both have to go. It’s 90 minutes, including a 45 minute breakfast. We opted to pay full price instead. After that, he didn’t talk to us at all for two days. Room - Pros: Everything was in good repair and kept very clean. Everything in the minibar is included: Coke products, water, cassava chips, and local beer. They refill it once a day, and you can request certain things. I recommend the spicy cassava chips. The Coke and Sprite have cane sugar rather than HFCS, like in Mexico, if that matters to you. Beds are comfortable. The AC works very well. The tub, shower, and sinks were fine, though I did take one shower without hot water in the morning. The soundproofing seemed quite good. On our last night there was loud, bass-heavy music outside, and in the master bedroom, you couldn’t hear it much at all. I’m easily bothered by noise while trying to sleep, so I very much appreciated that. This was at about 10 PM. After 11, there’s no loud noise at all, presumably because the kids are in bed by then. We paid extra for a swim-up room, which has a long, narrow pool right in front of it. My daughter loves swimming, so this was very worth it. They take care not to get grass and brush clippings in the water when they landscape around the pool, too. Room service is included, which you order through the TV menu, but it’s a bit slow (60-90 minutes; they quote 45). Strangely, while the TV mentions options like butter or red sauce to accompany pasta dishes, it doesn’t actually let you choose. We got it a few times and had to call each time to tell them our choice. Still, it all tasted very good. There were two 4K SDR TVs in the room, which seemed fairly new. If you brought a game console or streaming device, you can plug it in, but the input button on the remote doesn’t do anything. There’s a hidden button under the TV frame on the right side. Press it once to bring up the menu, and you can change the input from there. To go back to normal TV, you have to turn it off and back on. Cons: We had to get maintenance out for the toilet once since the toilet tank wouldn’t refill. You have to push the handle all the way back up after flushing, and if that doesn’t work, pull the metal bar or turn the green dial on the pressure vessel inside the toilet tank. There was also a ceiling tile that rattled when the AC was on (which was nearly always) but pushing up on it a bit got that to stop. Grounds: Everything looked great and was well-maintained. Everything on property is easily walkable, though there’s also a shuttle that loops around and will take you to the beach or to the water park. They don’t always stop even when there are seats available, though. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to that. Several times we just walked rather than deal with rejection. Our building (#6) to the beach or water park was about a 1/3 mile, 5-10 minute walk. Most signs are in both English and Spanish, but keep Google Translate on standby just in case. There are a few other things of interest sprinkled around the property, like a kiddie pool, a couple of photo spots, and a stage for shows at night. Shopping: There are three main stores: The Nick Shop and Maracas & Kalimbas in Gourmet Village, and Nick Knacks right outside the water park. Maracas & Kalimbas: Sells some cheap plastic toys and clothing for inflated prices, but more importantly, they have locally-made items like clay dolls, alcohol, cigars, and coffee. There are also some first aid items. The local products, especially the clay dolls, are a great deal, $8 to $30, and there are several wood carved items too. They do sell maracas, but not kalimbas! The only thing I recommend against buying local is the regular Santo Domingo coffee in the red bag. You can get that for less than half the price in the US. They have some other flavors you can only buy locally, though. Nick Shop: All of the toys here cost at least 2-4 times more than they would in the US. Bring one from home unless you’re in dire need or have more money than sense. A 6” plush or figurine of a Nick character is $75, for example. They do make personalized shirts on demand here for $47, which isn’t so bad given the quick turnaround time of 8-12 hours. Nick Knacks: Same expensive licensed toys as the Nick Shop, but in a space smaller than a hotel room. They make you walk through it every time you go to the water park. Activities: Most activities are free. Anything premium-sounding, like the Turtle Power dinner with the Ninja Turtles, is not. These aren’t always clearly disclosed on the website, but it is on the Karisma app that the activity schedule is on. Speaking of the app, you need to look it over every day. Unlike a cruise ship, there’s no daily intercom messages to recommend activities to you. We randomly stumbled upon several events and character meet & greets just by walking around. One of them was a Dominican outdoor dinner with a live DJ, fresh coconuts that they literally hacked open with a machete on demand, and a spit-roasted pig and that was fantastic. I don’t think that was even on the schedule at all. If you want to get a picture with one of the characters, that’s free. The staff were happy to take pictures with your phone without charging for it. Most of the time, only one character will be there, but sometimes they come in a pair. Check the schedule for time and location. Here’s who we saw - SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward Dora the Explorer: Dora, Diego, Boots TMNT: Leonardo & Donatello, Michelangelo & Raphael (2012 cartoon version) Blue’s Clues: Blue, Magenta Fairly OddParents: Cosmo or Wanda alone, or both together Paw Patrol: Chase & Marshall, Skye & Rubble, or any of them separately Santiago of the Seas: Santiago Merchandise and themed events at Club Nick usually include one of the above characters, plus Garfield, Avatar Aang, the Rugrats, and Lincoln and Lori Loud, but I didn’t see any meet and greets with them. None of the live-action series are referenced, except for Are You Afraid of the Dark? in the Snick Lounge along with some older Nicktoons characters like Ren & Stimpy. The only real popular characters with long lines to see them were the SpongeBob ones. There are pictures of some older Nick characters, like Ren and Stimpy, in the Snick Lounge. If you want to dump the kids someplace, that’s Club Nick. From 10-12 and 2-5, you can leave them there and go do something else while they have some themed activity. From 12-2 is “family play time” where you have to be there. They don’t feed them, either. Something they don’t tell you is that if you don’t register them at Club Nick right at 10 AM, and show up later, they aren’t obligated to take your kid. They can get full, and it’s not drop-in/drop-out. There’s free face painting every night at 6 PM, at least while we were there. You can make suggestions rather than having to pick from a list. Get there early, as there’s only one painter and she takes her time, so even a ten-person line can take over an hour. My daughter opted to have a Leonardo mask painted on for the Turtle Power dinner, which was the only add-on activity we did. It was about $150 for the three of us since we didn’t want to waste our morning and sanity at a sales presentation. That said, the $150 was worth it. All four of the TMNT (2012 cartoon style) were there, they had voice-over interactions, and you could get pictures with each one (individually). Donatello even sounded like Rob Paulsen, his actual voice actor. They taught the kids some dance moves, and they had friendly competition events with the staff, like stacking pizza boxes. Everybody gets an eye mask and (non-alcoholic) drink in your favorite turtle’s color. Dinner is a buffet and had several great options, like salmon, garlic shrimp, fried chicken, steak, mashed potatoes, and a salad bar. There was pizza too, but it wasn’t very good. The crust was tough and the cheese was low-quality. Seemed odd for a TMNT-themed event, especially when the Italian restaurant looked like they made much better-looking pizza. Aqua Nick water park: There are two sections to the water park, the front area with pools, a play area and a lazy river; and a back area with water slides. We only went to the front area. Chairs and towels are free, day beds and cabanas cost extra. Aqua Bite, the restaurant there, has wraps and grill items like hamburgers, plus smoothies and drinks. We tried the chicken salad wrap, chicken wings, and hamburgers and all were good. There was a shrimp chorizo wrap on the menu, but they didn’t have it on two different days. Beach area: The beach area has infinity pools as well as the actual beach and a swim-up bar. There’s no food here, but waiters will come by to bring you drinks. We got a great one who said he wasn’t supposed to bring food, but then even offered to get it from Fresco for us - which was a pretty long walk! They had Chicken Doner, fish and chips, and chicken Caesar salad which were all good. The drinks are a bit watered down, except for the coffee drinks. Those hit me pretty hard. We stayed up by the pools in a day bed, which unlike at Aqua Nick, were free to everyone. Probably. It wasn’t very crowded, and nobody kicked us out. No “reserved” signs either. The beach itself looked nice, but it was covered with seaweed, and worse, there are locals down there who will give you a hard sell on cigars, coconuts, and toys. They don’t come up to the pools, they may not be allowed to. Lifeguards were all around, at least. Restaurants: Explorer’s table - this is the only restaurant open every day for lunch, and the only sit-down breakfast restaurant. It’s a buffet, and it’s decent. There are some local Dominican food options, which were good to try, and an omelet station at breakfast. Sweets - This is actually a combination coffee/smoothie shop and ice cream shop. There are lots of flavored coffee options, some little pastries, and some bigger things like croissants, donuts and pound cake at breakfast time. We usually ended up here rather than Explorer’s Table for breakfast. They also had some wraps and smoked salmon bagels in here, but I would be careful ordering those. The temperature monitor at the bottom of the case said 12.4C (54F), which is WAY too high for food safety. It should be more like 2.8C (37F). I certainly hope they have good food safety practices elsewhere. On the ice cream side, they have a soft serve machine (broken on one of the three times we tried it) and several different flavors and mix-ins for ice cream, like a Cold Stone Creamery. We all liked the ice cream. There’s also a cotton candy machine that will make it for you on demand if you want to shell out $7 for it. All of the following restaurants require a reservation, which you have to make same-day through the app. If you don’t, or want to change the time, you probably won’t get in. We didn’t have any luck with that in person. Your concierge can make reservations more than a day in advance, assuming they’ll pay attention to you after you skip their sales presentation. You can order as many things as you want, but if there are leftovers, they won’t let you take them with you. Strange. Burgers.ph - we didn’t get the chance to go here. They’re not open every day. Wok Wok - an Asian Fusion restaurant. We tried the poke, seafood mixed grill, chicken chow mein, chicken yakatori kabobs, gyoza, and spring rolls. All were good except for the chicken in the chow mein being a little overcooked, but still flavorful. Spacewalker - an eclectic space-themed restaurant with several different kinds and styles of food. Everything we tried there was good, including the herb bread, Mercury steak, the pumpkin soup (which was more like squash soup, I think), and the chicken ravioli. The desserts were a bit off, though. The “apple pie” was a tiny, soft apple tart and the “chocolate lava cake” was like if a tiny chocolate lava cake had absolutely no chocolate sauce in it, so it was a bit dry. Verdello - this was supposed to be an Italian restaurant, and it looked the part, but anybody familiar with Italian food is going to notice a few things that aren’t quite right. They also had flatbread pizzas that looked a lot better than the ones at the Turtle Power dinner, but we didn’t order any of those. Appetizers were a mixed bag. The meatballs were very tasty, but they brought focaccia bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and none of them had any spices, so they were a lot blander than they should’ve been. Some rosemary for the bread and oregano for the olive oil would’ve went a long way. Also, the arancini were just bad. They were hard, solid lumps of fried rice with nothing inside, sitting in a very small amount of meat sauce. We got carbonara and gnocchi, which were fine. My wife also got ossobucco, which was very fatty and advertised as being on polenta, but it was on mashed potatoes. The tiramisu was as bad as the arancini. There were no ladyfingers in it, it didn’t taste much like coffee, and the consistency was off. It was more like a layer cake than anything. Fresco and Aqua Bite, the pool restaurants, were good as mentioned before. Snick Lounge only had drinks, but an excellent bartender, and several arcade machines with a couple dozen games each. Those were all free, which was great. They all had TMNT and TMNT 2, but there were no four-player cabinets, sadly. Air hockey tables and crane games required you to buy tokens at about $1.50-$2 each depending on how many you bought at a time. Spa - my wife and daughter went here and got the Mommy & Me package of a 25 minute massage, 25 minute facial, and manicure or pedicure for $299 (tip included, but my wife didn’t notice and tipped them again). She said they were definitely worth the extra and took very good care of them. Excursions - they have an in-house tour group, BRX, and other third-party tour groups are allowed in. Initially we booked with Nexus Tours, but they no-showed us, so don’t book with them… scrambling, my wife booked a four-hour visit to Barbara Adventure Park for dine buggy riding and swimming. One bus had power outlets and WiFi, the other didn’t. Both were comfortable. Prices were comparable to the other tour groups. Internet/apps - the on-site WiFi was top-notch, better than most American hotels, honestly. It covered the entire resort, including the beach, with only very few small dead zones. Speeds were 150-300 Mbps depending on where I tested it. It very rarely dropped. No sites were blocked as far as I could tell. If you watch any streaming services, keep in mind that some won’t work, notably Paramount+, which is what has nearly all of the Nickelodeon shows on it. Check Netflix, which tends to have those in the Dominican Republic, if you have to at. That’s not the resort’s fault, though. It’s open WiFi with no password, so if you have a VPN you should use it. Otherwise, be wary of accessing any bank apps. There are two apps you need on-site: The Karisma app for the activity schedule, and the Nickelodeon resort web app for booking restaurants and looking at menus. Both were functional if not elegant. The resort app gave errors that prevented us from changing a reservation time, and then when we went there in person there were no times left. Try to plan when you’ll eat for dinner that morning so you don’t have to deal with the app’s issues. Lastly, and this may just be a function of when we went, the resort wasn’t crowded at all. Aqua Nick was the most crowded section at any given time, and even there it was easy to find chairs in the shade. We never had to wait for restaurant tables as long as we came at the reservation time. Aside from face painting, lines were mostly short and moved quickly. I hate, hate, hate crowds (and waiting) so this may have been the best part of the experience overall for me. After four or five days, we started to feel like we had done pretty much everything we wanted to do, so that was plenty long enough for us. We probably won’t visit this particular resort again, not because we didn’t like it, but because our daughter will likely grow out of Nicktoons and want to try a different resort. We’ll certainly come back to the Dominican Republic in the future, though. This was our first all-inclusive resort, and I’m not sure we’d go for that pricing model again. We just don’t drink enough alcohol to make it worth the premium we paid for it, especially since it’s not like the kid could contribute.

This was our second visit to the Punta Cana Nickelodeon resort. We had a great time with our 7 yr old son. Opted for the swim up room since there is a lot of sargasso seaweed at the beach this time of year. The Aqua Nick water park was fun and we spent a few days there. Our son was 1/2” too short to ride the new, bigger water slides so that was disappointing but it’s a safety issue I guess. Service was generally very good and the staff was friendly. Our butler, Mr Jean was fantastic! He accommodated our cabana requests and dinner reservations and was very quick to respond when we had a question or needed something. He made it a very seamless stay. We enjoyed the magician and his dancers who performed one night in the auditorium and our son loved the bouncy castle and popcorn that was provided every evening after dinner. We also enjoyed the family pizza making activity hosted by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Our only criticisms are that the resort is starting to age so a bit of wear and tear in the room (the patio door was really hard to open and the shower door leaked all over the bathroom) but the resort as a whole was very well maintained. One of the beach front restaurants was under renovation and generally we wished there were some more food options but what was offered met our expectations. At Aqua Nick they play Nick radio all day which is about a 1 hour repeating play list so that got a bit repetitive and we wished they played more variety of music throughout the day. Also the food at Aqua Bite wasn’t the greatest so that could use some quality and variety improvement. Generally we had a great week and would recommend the resort to families with young and elementary aged children.

José el mayordomo nos atendió en uestra estadía en Nickelodeon, fuimos 2 familias y él se encargó de hacer de uestras vacaciones una experiencia inolvidable. José was our concierge for our stay at the resort, there were 3 generations on this trip and he made sure we all felr welcome and had an amazing time. Can't wait to go back.