Book a Hotel near Rosario Islands Oceanarium, Cartagena

La atención de los empleados y artesanos, muy respetuosos todos, el lugar un paraíso

The beach is beautiful but I did not have a pleasant experience. They charge additional Internet fees at very high prices. The room and bathroom cleaning is very bad. Be prepared to deal with a very uncomfortable troop of salesmen stalking guests everywhere in the facilities trying to sell Decameron annual packages.

This is not an eco resort but a place to lounge by a large pool (no beach) with loud continuous active music. There is a dive and snorkel program mornings. The winds kick up in the afternoon. Well kept up, Cocoliso caters to half Colombian 20 somethings and families with the occasional foreigner. The food is mediocre . It’s a 45 minute boat ride there but a 2 hour return because of a river flowing into the ocean. A day trip gives you 4 1/2 hours there. I stayed 2 nights which was unnecessary

Having visited more than 40 countries across across the globe, I have to say this is by far one of the worst hotels I’ve ever been to. In this Caribbean hotel there is no beach or swimming pool; the service is poor and sloppy; the facilities are desolated, eerie and look semi-abandoned; the food (anything with coconut rice and patacones) is tremendously overpriced; the reception personnel are arrogant and inexperienced; the boat rides to/from the hotel are a dissimulated theft; and to top it all, you get to kill some bugs while trying to fall asleep on your bed. The elegant chalet on the website is actually an average cabin with no privacy whatsoever. In fact, it has an open toilet leading to the bedroom without any door. Certainly not the most intimate get-a-way... Another common complain amongst all guests, and something we experienced on our first night, was the amount of bugs in the rooms. Spend five minutes with the light on and you will find yourself constantly slapping little bugs as they eerily crawl up the bed. The two tiny, tiny inlets, which they call beaches (playas), are nothing but a very distasteful joke. There is no beach at all, only 2-3 artificial terraces packet with sand and crammed with plastic chairs. Even a simple bath in any of the miniscule bays can prove difficult: you cannot swim too far because of all the passing boats and the water gets extremely dirty throughout the day. Another constant annoyance is the dozens of vendors inside the hotel who keep bugging you with every imaginable prospect of income, from selling bead necklaces to cooked lobsters, or a trip to another island. And all this happens within the hotel facilities… But by far the most outrageous scheme in this hotel is the 45min boat ride to/from the island, which due to its absurdity makes you feel like a secluded prisoner. The hotel transportation boat charges you 232,000 COP (roughly 125 USD) each way from/to Cartagena, but they only tell you this when presenting the check-out transcript. In case you don’t want to leave the island in the hotel’s vessel, which only departs once a day (3:30pm) to Cartagena, you can get a private boat with a dubious captain for 400,000 COP (roughly 220 USD)! You will be better off buying a return flight to Bogota… Conclusion: We had booked the hotel for 4 nights, ended up canceling the last 2, and regret not having cancelled the all thing.