Resting at the easternmost tip of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, Punta Cana is home to a vast coastline of sandy white beaches and crystal clear waters that attract divers and snorkelers from far and wide. The area is also known for its wide number of all-inclusive resorts where visitors can kick back and do as much – or as little –as they please.
A tranquil beach backed by lush foliage in Punta Cana (Andres Glez via Flickr)
For anyone planning a trip to Punta Cana and are seeking an all-inclusive package, our advice is to book using one of the market leading websites. They usually offer more options (for flights and resorts) than other websites and as market leaders they tend to have the best rates as well. Moreover, such is their desire to uphold their reputations among consumers, they also provide an extremely high level of customer service, not to mention lenient cancellation policies.
We’ve dug deep and produced comprehensive summaries of the three most reputable travel booking websites, which you’ll find below. We recommend checking any rates you find across all three websites to ensure finding the best deal for your Punta Cana adventure.
Comprehensive and clearly-written resort descriptions, including summaries of all on-site and local amenities, helps to make CheapCaribbean simple, informative and easy to use. The website claims to review – in person – all of the resorts it lists in order to verify their quality, which certainly adds to the credibility of its descriptions. Other advantageous features include a ‘deal of the week’, which families tend to desire to avoid hauling their kids onto public transport or paying for a hire car and children’s seats. Unfortunately, however, our search for all-inclusive packages to Punta Cana did find the number of resorts listed to be somewhat limited.
Our search for all-inclusive deals to Punta Cana with Expedia found a greater choice of resorts compared with CheapCaribbean, with high-end resorts particularly prevalent in the search results. Furthermore, we also found that rates for many of the resorts were lower with Expedia – so it’s always a good idea to cross-check any deals you find with equivalent searches on other websites. Other aspects we noticed included an excellent level of detail when it came to its flight research, with all the information you could need laid out clearly and concisely. Less favourably, the resort’s descriptions are a little rudimentary compared with competitor sites.
With Priceline, we found that both the resorts listed and their respective rates tended to be the same as with equivalent searches on Expedia. In contrast with Expedia, however, the interface is rather behind the times and not particularly user-friendly, either, which undermines the experience. Another downside is that the site doesn’t offer the option of booking airport transfers to your resort, so you would need to do this separately. We would principally recommend Priceline for anyone looking to book a resort with no flight included, as both pricing and availability seem to be best for these deals.
