This hotel is in the heart of Jaco, one of the most active beach towns in the country. It is located on the Pacific side, around 90 minutes from San Jose the capital via the new Caldera “highway“.
This is a small hotel. It is a building in the shape of a horseshoe, it has 4 or 5 floors. The rooms are ok, they have a small balcony.
Food is good, however, they have a really small menu.
One thing that is really important to know is that this place has only 6 parking spaces,not in a closed parking lot. Since it is located on the beach, you can leave your car under a palm tree on the beach, but this is a high crime zone, and if you leave something valuable in your car, you might not found it, or your car in the morning.
It has a medium size pool, however, you can see the street and the beach from the pool, and all the people on the street and the beach can see you also, you can't have privacy.
Summarizing, this is a cheap hotel (most of the times), but you should not stay here for a long period of time. There are a lot of other, more private options in Jaco or nearby beaches.
Also, one more thing, Jaco is a famous beach for surfing. However, it is NOT a beautiful beach, it has a high index of fecal contamination, and as i told before, has a very high crime rate.

The Hotel Balcon del Mar is located right next to a police station in Jaco, a very dicey town on the Pacific coast. While the ocean views are lovely, crime is ever-present. Drug dealers sell on the street with impunity and there are plenty of prostitutes cruising near the hotel. My advice is to stay out of Jaco altogether. It's impossible to avoid all the craziness around you and relax. We were booked at this hotel by Sunnyland Tours - another outfit that did not meet our expectations. They should have chosen a safer haven for us; we were on our honeymoon. The rooms are very sparse and worn, and the service was dismissive.

The beach at Jaco is NOT for swimming, as the rip-tides are rough. If you're a surfer, this is the beach for you. We recommend that you stay near the national parks further South.

I don't think I would ever visit Jaco again, but honestly, I'd probably return to this hotel and request room 409 if I had to. We got really, really lucky with our room, as it was very spacious and on the top floor. I had seen other rooms that were very cramped and ours wasn't like that at all. We had an ocean view, air conditioning, TV, and there was free WiFi across the whole property. My only complaint was the noise from outside and the lack of hot water. No one on our floor had hot water nearly the entire time, and that's just unacceptable when you are paying to stay at a nice hotel. It didn't even get warm, so it was quickly in and out for us.

We used Jaco as a home base for visiting the Manuel Antonio National Park, and taking a Crocodile tour of the Tabacon river. We didn't swim in the ocean as there are dangerous riptides there, and didn't shop because everything was geared towards tourists. When we were at the hotel, we ordered drinks and sat by the pool, watching the sun set over the ocean. That was really, really nice and became an evening favorite.

The hotel was very clean and like I said, our room was very, very spacious so we had no complaints. If you need a wheelchair accessible room, ask for one on the first floor, as they do not have elevators at this hotel.

Located right on the Pacific Ocean, with a spectacular view of the water, we were excited about staying here. However, the door to our room had large gaps (explaining the gecko getting into our shower), the rooms were awkwardly laid out, and the whole place felt cramped and jammed around the central pool. Food at the restaurant was not good at all -- poor quality (hot dog slices for breakfast?), monotonous. They did offer free Wifi. The worst part of our two-day stay was the fact that the pool maintenance crew yelled back and forth to each other, beginning at 5:40 am, awakening us! To be fair, when we complained to the front desk, the noise did stop. The cleaning staff on our upper floor also yelled back and forth to each other while working. We traveled with a group of 15 with Overseas Adventure Travel, and our fellow travelers echoed our ratings of this hotel.