We had just returned from Punta Cana EdenH Real Arena, second trip in Punta Cana, April 15-22, 2008.
HOTEL: Very nice, exquisite decor creates a warm and comfortable ambience.
ROOM: Room (2142) very nice designed and impeccably clean at our arrival and kept that way through out our stay. The maid did her job very well. Some mosquitoes ...o well you are in DR...a tropical country....
FOOD: I will say GOOD. You can tell they just opened and they look to improve menus/services daily...
BEACH: The beach was GOURGEOUS, with crystal clear water, and white sand! Chairs some days were ...some days not....Fruit lady came every single day with fresh , sweet fruits.
POOL: The hotel consisted of 3 pools and 1 mini pool. The main pool had lots of activities everyday, including dance lessons, pool games, aerobics, etc.
ENTERTAINMENT: The hotel had nice entertainment every night and one of our favorite shows was the Pikante show.
The whole staff at EdenH did a great job at accommodating us and tried their best to make us enjoy our stay. They were friendly and do not FORGET to tip them for their hard work!!!

My husband and I spent our honeymoon at Edenh from May 1-8. We had the time of our lives. Like everyone else we were quite concerned after reading some of the reviews but I can honestly say there is nothing to worry about. I will give you a break down of some of the more important things that I was worried about prior to leaving on our vacation.

Check in: We arrived at 2:30 pm. We were told that we had to wait 30 minutes for our room to be ready so we went to get a bite to eat at the buffet. When we came back at a little after 3pm everything was in order, the bell boy showed us to our room. Very easy, no problems.

Our room: We were in building 2 on the fourth floor facing the pool. AWESOME view!! The room was very clean, towels and face clothes were replenished daily. The mini bar wasn't always restocked but as long as we had bottled water to brush our teeth that's all that mattered to us, we know where the bar is for everything else.

Food: The buffet was typical of any resort I've been to in the Dominican. There is a pasta bar which was nice but don't expect to eat at the buffet like you would at home...the food is different. We ordered room service every morning for breakfast and it was great. It took about 20 minutes to arrive to your room, it was warm and they give you more food than anyone could imagine eating. At night we would go to an a la carte by 6pm and we were able to walk right in, no waiting. We tried the Shore Grill twice, we really liked the chicken burritos. We ate at the Asian twice, the Hibachi was awesome. We tried the Italian once, the pasta and veal was pretty good. Again, don't go there expecting the food to be like the food you would get at a restaurant in your home town, your in the Dominican and they are not known for their superb cuisine.

Beach, Pool and Bars: The beach is gorgeous, lots of seaweed but that didn't bother me much. You can walk in the water without having to wear shoes, the bottom is soft sand. The pool with the swim up bar was our favorite spot. Alexis is the bartender and he will keep you very well entertained. The Tantra bar is a tonne of fun, the music is lacking but with the right company you won't even notice it. The Sports and Lobby bar served some really nice drinks, try a dirty monkey...yummm!

If your planning on going to Edenh don't worry, unless your a super picky person with unreal expectations you will have a great time!!

edited review- Just returned on May 4th, we were there from April27th to May4th. This is about our 10th trip to Punta Cana. YES, we were very concerned about the previous reviews, Big Time. Yeah we got a good deal, so we went for the Paradise Club and hopefully in six months we can get the same deal - we will go back!

Beach chairs - not any problems - they must have received the shipment.

Just a note - we are not in our younger years (we both work full time, every day) and have a different agenda than a younger traveller (we used to be one). But just so you know, on our trip into the hotel we were with a young honeymoon couple that just loved it and had a great time!

Problems with ala carte restaurant? - none- however we do not eat at 5:30 or 6:30, even at home we usually eat at 7:30 or 8:00, in fact I just cleaned up from our diner and it:s 9:35. Ala carte restaurants were perfect for us; first we didn't go until 8:30 or 9:00 and waited, at the most 15 or 20 minutes. No you are not in a smoke infested restaurant. I smoke, my husband doesn't, never has and in the ala carte restaurants there is no smoking. In the buffet they have a section for those "nasty" people.

ALL of the staff spoke more English than any of the other resorts we have been to and worked extremely hard. They were more than happy to acommadate you and were very friendly.

We enjoyed the casino, it's only $5 at the black jack tables and they serve drinks. The poor serve has to go outside to another building to fill her orders, they should have a service bar in the casino. We played every night, in fact closed it some nights. In the end my husband won a couple of hundred and I lost $55 - horrors!

Our room was in building 1 and our room was 1272, second floor, with view of ocean and in front of pool. We were very near the beach, which is near the restaurant on the beach. You can sit and have a drink and eat, enjoy the scenery or be at the beach and come and eat :something". I can truthfully say that the food there was just okay, not great and the same all the time, but, hey, the surroundings were awesome and serene.

The buffet has a different theme every night and just so you know - you will not starve.

We did have one mosquito in our room at check-in and I made that little sucker disappear real quick. After about our 3rd day a can of bug spray appeared in our room, maybe we got someone else's, so I did spray the balcony, as not to waste it.

They have a beach party on Saturday nights and boy-o-boy do they try

We, two retired couples, stayed at the EdenH from April 12 – 26. We too had read all the reviews for months before we travelled and were very concerned, but since we had already been to three new 5-star properties (excellent, by the way) we were not overly concerned.

Many of the positive reviews are accurate, but many of the negative reviews also have merit. We believe the reviews reflect the occupancy rate during the particular week the reviewer was there. If you are getting great service, you let a lot of negatives slip by. The resort management should have enough experience to know the types of start-up problems that occur, should have had sufficient staff hired and trained, and after four months everything should have been running like clock-work.

We loved the layout and size of the resort, our rooms were spacious, lots of storage room, comfy beds and pillows, and a large safe. The maid service left a lot to be desired! The bed was made and the bathroom tidied up. Sometimes we got towels, other times not. Many times our wet towels were rehung on the shower door. The same sheets were on the bed for two weeks! Some days our room was still not made up at 4:30 when we returned from the beach.

The beach is awesome! Workers continuously picked up empty bottles and drink cups since there were no waste cans anywhere. There was no option but to place garbage under your beach chair since even if you took it back to the beach buffet area, there was no place to put it. We tipped these workers every few days; they did their jobs so quietly and patiently. Seaweed was raked every morning and carted away.

Staff in the buffet and a-la-cartes was friendly and outgoing. We didn’t have a lot of trouble getting into any restaurant, but even with long line-ups there were still empty tables inside because there simply was not enough staff to serve them. In our opinion, this resort has some really great staff that worked under very stressful conditions yet managed to keep a smile on their face. There were just not enough of them. Of particular note is Hostess Liby at the Shore Grill who took a lot of criticism about the lack of a reservation system from disgruntled guests who tried to bully their way in. She handled it with grace and poise and never let it get to her. We did have an instance at the Shore Grill when we requested a table for 6; after a lengthy wait we were given two tables, a booth for 4 and an adjoining table for 4 where two of us sat about 3 feet from the others. We were not permitted to move the table closer to the booth so we could talk. When a manager in a suit with the wine list came around, we kindly asked him if we could move the table against the booth since we were in an out of the way corner but he forbade us to move it since it was against company policy! Service in the buffet at breakfast was slow and the staff was overwhelmed at times. It was especially difficult to get coffee and some days you couldn’t even get a cup, let alone coffee to put in it. The pasta bar at lunch and dinner was excellent, as was the bread and cheese section. The rest of the food at the buffet was repetitive, not well identified, and mostly cold to barely warm. Table service in the evenings in the buffet was very good. Lunch menu at the beach buffet was excellent and included fresh salad, tasty fries, yummy grilled chicken and some of the best pizza ever!

Service was sorely lacking at the beach bar and the upper end of the swim up bar facing the beach buffet. If you weren’t a man or a young girl in a bikini, forget about getting served; they would just skip over you, even if you tipped or were holding money in your hand. If someone asked for a cerveza, they would serve them first and then forget your order. Many times we had to hold our arm out to interrupt the bartender from passing us by again. It was clear that they were overwhelmed by the constant line-ups and were always running out of something -- rum, ice, water, straws, etc. The lobby bar’s only blender broke down and they were unable to make slushy drinks. They also kept running out of wine glasses and served wine in thin plastic cups.

The chair war … oh, what can I say? There was no war among guests … the whole battle was with the guards! Some days by 6:15 am there wasn’t anything at the beach; you could still get a chair at the pool until shortly after 7, but there always seemed to be chairs at the VIP pools. Two of our group addressed this with the resort and we were told the resort had enough chairs for 2 people per room but that they were at full capacity with an average of 3 people per room. The resort was actually overbooked and large groups of people had been bumped to other resorts in the area and compensated with a free week or two depending on this year’s booking. Yet they still would not admit there was a problem with insufficient chairs and laid the blame solely on the shoulders of their guests. They “seem” to have a policy in place that you have to sit on your chair until 7 a.m. in order to reserve it, or if you are gone more than an hour the guards can remove your things. This “policy” changed daily according to the guards. Guards were being bribed to take things off chairs where people just arriving wanted to sit and that was that, even if the first group had just gone to breakfast. One guard wrote in the sand “45” minutes, another one wrote “30” to people complaining that someone had taken their things. We watched another guard take 4 towels at 5:15 in the morning and place them on a location saving them until 7:15 when one person showed up, slipped him money and left not returning until 10:45. This continued for 4 consecutive days even while they were stripping resort towels and all personal property off every other chair not occupied until 7 am. It got so bad that everyone was teaming up with their neighbours to keep an eye on their stuff so they could take a stroll, go to the bar and eat in shifts. After challenging a guard who tried to take his things, one gentleman became a target every morning by the guards and he felt he was being harassed by them. One day, after a particularly vicious sweep, one staff member was assigned to guard all confiscated property until a cart came, loaded it all up and took it to the lobby for safe-keeping. That’s where everyone had to go to retrieve their things. They also stopped some people from moving pool chairs to the beach while turning a blind eye while others did the same thing. That day there was almost a mutiny among the guests and the hotel received a lot of complaints about the chairs and the lack of service. There was a definite improvement in service the next day, and the guards were not quite as aggressive on the beach, but the same guard saved the same spot every morning for the same people.

Based on our experiences, we would rate the EdenH at 3.5 Stars at best but it has the potential of becoming a very nice 5-star some day. Some areas of the resort have an unfinished look and the resort already needs a lot of maintenance to address what looks like substandard workmanship. After a particularly heavy rainfall, there were numerous leaks all over the resort including one in the main lobby where a pot light was hanging out of the ceiling. In building 2, of the three sets of elevators that we accessed the first two were out of order the entire two weeks; the second set had one out of commission most of the two weeks, and one elevator in the third set had its 1st floor button hanging out of its socket by its wire for most of our stay. Power outages became a daily occurrence, sometimes three or four an evening, including the evening we were departing. We were in the baggage storage area with our hands on our luggage when the power went out, again, this time for about 20 minutes or more. Many people were in the dark with a lighter flame trying to find their luggage to load on their bus.

Although these aspects do not make or break your vacation, they do not contribute to the relaxing 5-star “spa” like experience advertised. Despite the frustrations we had a good vacation due to the many new friends we made and some of the really nice staff that we came to know.