Punta Cana Made Easy

Picking a Property

Because I wanted to test a different resort every night, I booked airfare and resorts separately. The planning was an exercise in frustration. Just finding a Web address or phone number was often a challenge. One resort cut me off during phone transfers six times in a row. The seventh time I actually got a reservations agent and asked if they had rooms available for a given night. "Yes," he answered, and hung up.

Everyone involved in the Punta Cana tourism industry is quite familiar with the packaged tourist, and totally flummoxed by the independent traveler who just wants to rent a room. So do yourself a favor and contact a travel agent or tour operator.

Start, though, by narrowing down the choices before picking up a phone or a mouse. Use the chart on this page to help you decide which of the many similar-seeming resorts you want to include in your package, and ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I want the intimacy and familiarity of a smaller resort -- small in this context means less than 400 rooms -- or the advantages of size that come from a place with 1,000-plus rooms? (The biggest resorts will have more pools and restaurants to choose from, but you lose a sense of intimacy, and getting from the lobby to the beach to your room will mean a longer hike.)

• How much extra do I want to pay to improve the room substantially, the food marginally, and the drinks and beach experience not at all?

• Do I want calm surf? If so, choose from resorts on the southern part of the Punta Cana area. If boogie-boarding or body-surfing is important, head to the north, where the Atlantic holds sway on the island surrounded by Atlantic and Caribbean waters.

• Am I satisfied with beach and swimming pools, or is tennis, a gym, golf or a casino essential?

Once you've zeroed in on a few choices, hone in on the details. Our chart lists Web sites that offer pictures and descriptions. For the tiny details -- down to whether they put flowers on the washcloths -- visit a Web site I unfortunately stumbled over late in my planning process, www.debbiesdominicantravel.com. You can probably find all you need to know at one of the online review sites that take on the world. At www.tripadvisor.com, for example, you'll find more than 100 reviews of Punta Cana. But Debbie's Dominican Republic focuses on that island alone and has more than 4,000 reviews.

The site is an amazing exercise in the democratic review process. Thousands of people who've stayed in Punta Cana want to share the nitty-gritty of their experience, and Debbie lets them rip.

I found the site intriguing enough to track down Debbie. Turns out Debbie Downey of Ontario, Canada, enjoyed a trip to Punta Cana in 1998, just about the time her husband thought he'd like to learn how to make a Web page. She provided a review of their trip so her husband, Pat, would have content for what was intended to be a personal home page.

It caught on, and Debbie, in her spare time, posts the thoughts of thousands of people from around the globe. The site, she says, gets about 7,000 hits a day.

Sometimes, what a Debbie reviewer hates is what will convince you to go. For instance, consider the posting of Julie from the University of Massachusetts: "We were disappointed to find very few Americans and even fewer Spring breakers."