After Milo was born we really wanted to go somewhere into the summer. Winter 2019-2020 in Gothenburg was not pleasant - no snow, about 0 to +5 with a lot of wind, darkness and rain. Not cool. Initially we planned to visit Emirates or something in that area - it's the closest destination that has sea and sun. The main thing was entertainment for Alisa, we had to have something there which was kids friendly. We knew almost nothing about that area but found a few nice pricy hotels with, what seemed to be a good focus on kids. Eventually the price!/quality/unknown was not in our favor so we scrapped the idea of amirates and moved to new idea.

What about Sri Lanka? It was nice there, good beaches, things to do, price worthy and we know it. We started investigation and it turned out that we can't go there when the season is good due to our work schedules. At that point we have given up on vacation in spring and agreed that we will go somewhere in the summer.

The next day I get a message from Alena that she found a good vacation tour to Dominican Rep. It was all inclusive, 15 days and very price worthy. What not to like about it? Maybe the 10 hours flight from Kopenhagen? Naah, we can handle it. So we booked it.

The journey

It was a lot cheaper to flight from Copenhagen than from Gothenburg, both flights were direct, but we settled on the flight from CPH. It was a 10am flight so to make sure we don't miss it (since you can't really trust sj), we took the train one day before the flight and stayed over nite in Malmö.

Sidenote. Radisson Blu in Malmö has awesome family rooms and great breakfast. Highly recommended by us. 

In the morning we took a 20 minutes train ride to the CPH Airport and took that tui charter flight to Punta Cana. The flight was nice, Alisa was watching free entertainment, Milo was mostly in our hands. Both kids fell asleep only for the last 3-4 hours of the flight. 

Overall it was a pleasant experience during the flight, we had to wait a bit on the passport control in DR and that was a bit tiresome. 

The hotel

we book the trip to the Riu Naiboa hotel - it was the good price ratio and the pictures were quite pretty. In reality we were not very happy with the hotel, the room, the food and the entertainmnet. The Riu complext consist of 5 big hotels very close to each other so we went on a hunt to see how the other hotels looks and we really enjoyed the Riu Palace Punta Cana. So the next day we moved to that hotel (with an extra fee of 100$ per night). Riu Palace Punta Cana met our expectation - the room had enough space for the whole family, the hotel was a lot better, bigger and nicer. They had espresso machines in their bars which we really wanted because we missed the good coffee! 

Overall 

we are happy that we got an opportunity and we (Alena) found that super-price-worthy tour to DR and we enjoy our time here. A lot of people come by asking how old is our baby and they are quite surpriced to hear "two months" but there are plenty of babies around here in the hotel who are not much older than Milo. It is nice to see that people travel with young children. I wouldn't even count the amounts of kids in the hotel - it's a lot! So many that one of the 5 hotels in the complex is adults only hotel because it has a casino inside. 

We are not much of a beach going family, we love spending time on a beach, playing with sand and dipping feet into the water but swimming is not something we miss so wavy waters don't disappoint us. And the waters here are a bit too wavy for Alisa to go in (it's an Ocean after all). A lot of the experience depends on small things like food in the hotel, the kind of room you get and staff attention - everything is great with Riu Palace and we enjoy our time so far.