My wife and I stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel for two nights, on a car road trip from Cabo San Lucas to Loreto, and one night on the return trip back from Loreto to Cabo. We are frequent visitors to Mexico and to La Paz. When we visit La Paz, we usually stay in one of La Concha Hotel's condo units, however no units were available during this visit.
The Crowne Plaza hotel is located about 20 minutes by car from downtown La Paz. It is on the bay and has a small strip of beach sand from which you can wade into the bay, if the tide is in...or mud when the tide is out. On each of the days of our three-day stay, there appeared to be about 6-10 guests staying at the hotel.
There are 3 swimming pools at the hotel. One afternoon, my wife and I were the only guests using the pool and we each had our own swimming pool. Occasional beverage and food service was provided to the pool area from the restaurant. Periodically during the day, large tanker trucks came to pump water into the swimming pools. We became concerned about the level of chemicals in the pool as my wife noted that her hair was adversely affected by the pool water during our last days stay. On the morning we checked out to return to Cabo San Lucas, approximately 9:30 AM, we saw that plates, glass bottles, and drinking glasses were left out overnight. Several empty glasses were left on the edge of the pool deck coping. We were surprised that glass service was used in the pool area and were not promptly removed.
The hotel, grounds, and landscaping are beautiful but appeared not to be well maintained except the lobby and restaurant areas. During our two stays, we occupied two different rooms. On our first two-night stay, several lights were out in the interior hallway entrance to our room (suite), to the point we had to feel around in the dark to find the outside door handle to unlock the door to enter our room.
Both suites we stayed in were large but lighting was poor for reading. The air conditioning units were very noisy and difficult to adjust to a consistent temperature setting. One room had a safe without instructions for use. The other similiar suite did not have a safe.
We did not use the restaurant except for breakfast on two mornings. The breakfasts were good. The restaurant seemed to be periodically busy and appeared to host several group events each day/evening. For our three evening dinners, we went to La Paz's Malecon area. During this La Paz visit I had my worst meal ever, in twenty plus years of visiting Mexico, at Carlos & Charlies restaurant (fish tacos...small burnt particles of fish in A-1 sauce...left the entire meal on the plate after three bites... awful... nasty... expensive).
Overall, we would not consider staying at La Paz's Crowne Plaza Hotel in the future due to its location and service levels. The hotel seems to be caught in the vicious cycle of needing more guests to fund improved services but also needing to significantly improve service levels to attract more guests.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
