Villa or Hotel in Mexico? What We Tell First-Timers

At the marina in La Cruz, a little after seven, Héctor — one of Punta Mita's best-known chefs — is holding up the morning's parrotfish for the camera. The chefs who cook in the houses we rent are at the same kind of counter at the same kind of hour, and the people they will feed tonight are still asleep. Not one of them will ever see this part. That is most of the difference between a villa and a hotel, and it happens before anybody is awake.

Nearly everyone who calls us about a first villa has booked resorts for twenty years. They ask the same two questions in the same order: is it actually better, and is it actually more expensive. Here is what we tell them, including the part where we say book the hotel.

When a hotel is the better answer

A couple, three nights, a long weekend. Book the hotel. You will be out of the room most of the time anyway, and nobody wants to think about groceries for three days.

Anyone who wants a scene. A bar with other people at it, a band at six, a lobby you walk through and meet someone. A house is quiet by design. If the quiet is not the point, the house is the wrong purchase.

A flight that lands late. There is much to be said for walking into a lobby, taking a key and going to sleep. Some of our guests book one hotel night and move to the house in the morning, and that is a sensible way to start a week.

And two people in a ten-bedroom house is a strange, echoing thing. The house needs the group.

What staffed actually means, hour by hour

Say there are eight of you. Or fourteen, or twenty-two. Here is the day as it runs in a house that is genuinely staffed — and all of this is from the listings themselves, which is the only place we take it from.

Seven in the morning: the chef is in the kitchen. At Villa Mandarinas in Mismaloya there are two of them, and the listing says what they do without decorating it — breakfast, lunch and dinner, daily. Breakfast is when you come down, not when the restaurant opens. Three of you at seven and the rest at eleven is two breakfasts, and nobody is counting.

Mid-morning: the house manager. Not a butler. Most of these houses do not employ one and we do not use the word unless they do. The house manager is the person who gets the boat, finds the car, knows which restaurant will seat fourteen on a Saturday, and tells you straight that the thing you read about is not worth the drive. At Villa Mandarinas that person is on the property from nine until seven and reachable after.

The middle of the afternoon: nothing happens. That is the point of it.

Eight in the evening: dinner at the house, one table, the people you brought. This is what surprises first-timers most. In a resort you eat near your friends. In a house you eat with them, and the evening does not end because a restaurant closes.

Midnight: the pool. It is yours. Nobody asks you to keep it down, and nobody put a towel on it at six in the morning.

The arithmetic, in words

The comparison people reach for is per room per night, and it is the wrong one. Do it per head, and then add the food.

Take La Villita, in Lower Conchas Chinas above Puerto Vallarta: fourteen bedrooms, sleeps twenty-eight, a private chef with daily meal service, a waiter and a bartender, daily housekeeping. Take the nightly rate for the bedrooms you actually need, divide it by the number of people, and sit with that figure for a moment. Then take what you were about to pay for twelve hotel rooms, add three restaurant meals a day for twenty-eight people, add the drinks, add the resort fee, and add the fact that half the group eats separately because the table seats eight.

We will not tell you the house always wins. For two people it loses, badly. Somewhere around six to eight the lines cross, and past twelve it is not close.

One more thing, said as something we have noticed rather than a rule: Vallarta houses tend to come with the chef included for roughly what a house without one costs on the other coasts. The service culture on that coast is deeper and older, and it is the main reason we send first-timers there.

What you give up

Room service at two in the morning. A spa downstairs. Somebody else's problem when the hot water goes — a house has a maintenance person, not an engineering department, and on the rare day something breaks, you will know about it.

You also give up being anonymous. The staff learn everybody's name on the first afternoon. Most people like that more than they expected to. A few do not, and it is worth knowing which you are before you book.

Who to ask

The question is never villa or hotel in the abstract. It is this group, these dates, this many bedrooms, and how much being looked after you actually want. Tell Rocío how many of you there are and what the week is for — a birthday, a reunion, a retreat, a week with no reason at all — and she will tell you which house, and whether a house is the right answer for you at all.

If it is, start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta.