On June 20th 2009 I went to Cuba with my friend Jaylene. We had originally planned for Mexico, but then the swine flue broke out. With worried parents and having logic we opted out of Mexico and found great package deals for Cuba.
For several weeks before we booked, we spent hours pouring over resorts online to see their locations and reviews. We wanted to find out about excursions we could go on, what we are not allowed to take with us into Cuba, their currency and how to exchange, forms of transportation, tipping etc. We tried to cover pretty much every basis. But seriously the internet knowledge for Cuba is extremely disappointing. Even travel agents could barely tell us much about anything. They could only give us brochures and could only touch on the very basic topics of currency and where to get best rates, and getting your transportation to your resort. But if you asked about location, reviews, excursions, other forms of transportation etc. They say look online its the best source.... Good luck with this.
Traveler reviews for anything on Cuba are minimal. Try looking up any resort or excursion or anything of any Cuban topic regarding your trip and find a good web page dedicated to it. Besides Trip Advisor, your out of luck. Its almost impossible to find anything. If you do find different sites they generally all say the same thing word for word. Your best bet is to go out and purchase a guide book on Cuba, continuously watch Trip Advisor, and also type in your resort or excursion or what ever question you have into YouTube.com You will find videos relating to that topic and you can see first hand what others do there.
So after finding out some good deals online for different resorts through (Orbitz, Flight Center, Red Tag, itravel2000) we started looking into reviews. Trip Advisor and Youtube being our only online friends, it boiled down to the Sol Palmeras, and Melia Veradero. We would have been happy with either as they were sister resorts sitting side by side to each other, but the Sol Palmeras won as it offered more water and land activities then the Melia.
We went to our local Flight Center agency, and booked our package and traveled with Air Canada the entire way there and back. It was a very pleasant experience. I hear terrible reviews, and I am not sure what all the bad rep with Air Canada is about. The service we had on the plane there and back was very good. The plane supplied us with movies to watch, radios, a GPS system to see where in Canada we were flying over and more. This was probably the most amazing flight experience I have ever had. I am terrified of flying and never once did I feel threatened.
OH I do want to mention though that if you book an international trip package that has connecting flights, see if you can get flights that give you a bit more then an hour to connect* Pre-packaged vacations give you such shitty flight times. This we found out later. This was probably the only Air Canada experience I didnt like. But you can get this with any airline.
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