We have enjoyed the Grand Palladium every year since 2007, including 2009, the swine flu year. But 2020 was our most challenging year so far. We booked the Palladium five times and had to cancel four times. Finally in early November the Mexican government finally allowed resorts to open if strict COVID protocols were followed. Given our in depth knowledge of this resort we felt we could visit COVID safe if we could just get there.
Our strategy to get to Cancun meant maximum PPE for the entire travel day and that was the challenging part. As expected there was no safe place to take a short break from PPE. Our PPE included an N95 mask and goggles. After hours of wearing this PPE everything started to feel uncomfortable, pain from ears, from nose, from hair. But in the end it was all well worth it.
Once we arrived our main strategy was to NOT eat indoors. Our 2020 Palladium vacation was 10 days long and during that time we had to eat inside only twice(one lunch and one dinner). During both of our inside dining experiences we were 20+ feet from the nearest table and always reapplied our masks when servers were coming. The staff was great. They always wore their masks and checked if we needed anything from a distance only coming to our table when taking or removing meal items.
The occupancy rate during our stay was about 10% which was mostly locals and a few Americans. This meant very few dinner restaurants were open on any particular night. Thus our goal to never eat indoors was made more difficult because not all restaurants had outside tables. Also some nights were rainy and fewer restaurants had covered outside dining options. Obviously we felt fortunate that we had all but one of our dinners outside.
Another change in 2020 was no "cat café", or so it was called. During our many years to the Palladium we would always see some cats from time to time, always very friendly. It was common to see people bring some table scrapes to the cats. A few years ago the resort asked that you not do this. But someone had to feed them. The solution the Palladium resort stepped up and created the "cat café", meaning they were feeding them in a private cat location. Unfortunately the "cat café" was a causality of the months of closure. So when we arrived there were a lot of hungry cats, most still very friendly. Some guests had actually brought cat treats with them from home. We did our part by filling our baggie from dinner and as you can see from our "images" the cats liked the treats very much.