Week with extended family of 10

We took a week long trip (saturday-saturday) with a group of 10 about a month ago. Ages ranged from 7-70. My parents managed all the reservations through a travel agent they know from their neighborhood so we were extremely fortunate to not have to deal with the process of securing reservations. The travel agent did say that was quite a process but she secured the parks/excursions we requested and all the dinner reservations. We were hesitant to do too many dinner reservations since this was all of ours first time at an all inclusive and we were a little worried of being too "locked in" to a schedule.

Overall everyone had an AMAZING time. We waited about 20 minutes at the airport lounge before the bus left for the hotel, check-in was mostly seamless although my sister had to wait about an hour for their room to be ready. They offered her a different room but it was a king with queen pull out couch, since they have two teens they really needed a room with two queens so they opted to wait. This was fine, they just put their luggage in our room and changed in there and we went to the pool.

Even though we were there a full 6 days we all feel like we didn't even scrape the surface of what this place has to offer. We did the 1/2 day Tulum and Xel-Hal. Our kids could have done without the Tulum tour but all the adults and older teens enjoyed it and learning a little history. Xel-Hal was awesome, we could have done a whole day there as we did feel a little rushed to try and do everything!

We did the Xcaret park (took the boats). Once you get off the boats there is a little kiosk and a person who shows you all the extras, my kids were dead set on the dolphins so we ended up doing that. We really enjoyed that and my kids truly loved it, but because of the timing of that we were kind of limited with everything else we could see/do. By the time we were done with that everyone was hungry and since food/drinks are not included over there we opted to head back to the resort and didn't do much else over there.

We did two trips to Xplor, and that park is truly amazing. We had to go back a second morning just to do a few activities one more time. We had 2 full days were we just stayed on the resort and pool hopped. My family of 4 did a little bit of the river swim on the hotel itself, by my sister and her kids stuck solely to the pools. We did go down early one morning and made reservations for kayaking one morning, only 30 minute sessions but that is more than enough time to do a few laps of the areas you can go.

Overall, I would definitely go back. We enjoyed the food (I did get a little tired of buffet so I would try and do more reservations the next time, but if we didn't get them it wouldn't be a deal breaker). We also had 10/0 service with room service, it was always on time, hot and tasty.