Despite living in Florida I very rarely visit the Caribbean. Fares from Tampa to San Juan are consistently low, often as low as $69 each way thanks to JetBlue flying between the two cities nonstop. So I finally pulled the trigger and booked a 24-hour trip to San Juan. A friend found equally good fares from the west coast, so booked a stay at the same time.
I really struggled in regards to where to stay. I try to stick to Hyatt, Starwood, and Priority Club as much as possible, though in this case no option was ideal. Hyatt doesn’t have a hotel in San Juan, so they weren’t an option. The InterContinental San Juan gets awful reviews in terms of their Royal Ambassador treatment, so I did what I could to avoid it.
That narrowed it down to the two Sheratons, one of which is at the convention center, and the other of which is in Old Town. I was tempted to go with the convention center location since it’s a new hotel and gets generally good reviews. The Old Town Sheraton also gets good reviews, though is a much older hotel.
So in the end as a result of indecisiveness I decided to book the Ritz Carlton, which seemed to offer the best of both worlds (though at a cost). It’s close to the airport, at the beach, and gets all around great reviews.
The rate for one night was $339. That’s by no means cheap, though by booking through a Virtuoso agent we received a $100 resort credit, full daily breakfast, and a room upgrade at no additional cost. Like I said it isn’t cheap, though when you’re splitting the costs two ways and get all those extra perks, it really is a pretty good value, in my opinion.
Anyway, I arrived in San Juan at around 1PM and we took a taxi to the Ritz Carlton. San Juan seems to have a bit of a taxi mafia as all the prices are fixed. In the case of the Ritz Carlton, a taxi cost $10 plus $1 per bag (there was a bit of a discrepancy as to whether a backpack or laptop bag counts as a bag for these purposes, since we were charged $12 on the way out and $14 on the way back). The ride took less than 10 minutes.