Travel for Love

It’s cold and gray today in Pittsburgh, with snow flurries, so I thought I’d warm up by writing about our recent trip to the Dominican Republic.  We flew into Santo Domingo airport and stayed at the Oasis Canoa Resort near La Romana from October 3-10, 2009. This report is split into two parts.

Planning and Destination Choice

Roberto and I were looking for a trip to see each other between our Europe trip in July and my plans to travel to Brazil over Christmas. Our last several trips together had been busy and active so we thought it would be fun to do something easy and relaxing. The biggest factor was budget, with vicinity to both Brazil and the US and low hassle also being factors. We set our budget at $2000 US and started searching. Due to time constraints (less than one week trip) we narrowed our search down to the Caribbean and Central America. We started by searching for flights from Floripa, since it’s harder to get to these places from Brazil than from Pittsburgh. Here is my short list: Aruba, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, and Panama.

Mexico would have been a great option with it’s inexpensive all-inclusive resorts and great flight options from both continents, but Brazilians need a visa to enter Mexico so it didn’t have the “no hassle” quality. Costa Rica also had great flight options and hotels were fairly reasonable. We thought we could do CR for this budget but decided we would prefer to go there for more adventure and less relaxation (plus I had been there before). Similarly, Panama was very reasonable, but we thought we would have to do a lot of research and planning so we’d save that trip for later.

As for the Caribbean destinations, there were a wide range of factors there. Flights to Aruba were very reasonable, but the hotels and resorts were not, so it ended up not being in the budget. Jamaica definitely looked like a good option resort wise, but we could not find any reasonable flights from Brazil. But, we found that flights to Punta Cana, and Santo Domingo DR were quite cheap from Floripa (relatively) and it offered some of the cheapest resort prices I’ve seen.

Roberto on the beach

It turns out that, despite the numerous packages available from Pittsburgh to Punta Cana for under $500, finding a cheap flight was not easy. But I did find a great price (~$200) on US Airways’ Saturday to Saturday flight to SDQ. We confirmed that a flight from Floripa was available on those dates, and Roberto got himself a flight on Copa Airlines connecting in Panama City. It was around $1200 US. Our flights even got in around the same time, around 10 pm on Saturday night.

After some research we decided to book a resort on one of the beautiful beaches in La Romana, about 2 hours east of the SDQ airport. Through TripAdvisor reviews and prices on CheapCaribbean.com, we decided on the Oasis Canoa. For one week all-inclusive I think the price was like $745 for the two of us, including transfers from the airport. So, all said and done, we came in pretty close to the original budget! And for a whole week!

Getting There

We should be used to meeting in airports by now, but it’s always an adventure to try and land in a new country and arrange to meet without cell phones. My flight arrived early (and I got upgraded to first class both legs!) so I had about an hour to wait before Roberto’s flight was scheduled to arrive. I parked myself on my suitcase in baggage claim and hung around as the passengers on my flight trickled out. Now I must confess I was pretty nervous about arriving in the airport by myself after reading about how chaotic and dangerous it was while killing time on my layover. But I was pleasantly surprised by how kind the people were and they even helped me out greatly by noting that I was waiting in the wrong baggage claim area for the arriving Copa flight and taking me to the right one. Who knew the Santo Domingo airport had more than one international terminal?

Our driver from Turinter Tours (booked on CheapCaribbean) was waiting for us at the chaotic exit to the terminal. It was just the two of us in his van and we set off to the resort in the hot, humid night. His driving was pretty crazy and Roberto was getting pretty annoyed, but I was perfectly happy to be on vacation and didn’t care at all about the driver! We arrived sometime after midnight and were pleasantly surprised by how nice the lobby and grounds were as we were escorted to our room. We had a quick snack in the 24 hour buffet before going to sleep.

In Part 2 I will describe the activities and provide a review of the resort.