Why We Loved Esperanza for Our Babymoon

While so many east coasters are taking summer trips to Europe, Rich and I headed west to Cabo this week for a four-day babymoon. It was the perfect time to go because it’s low season which means there are no crowds, the flights and rooms are less expensive, and the weather is great (in the high 80’s - so really no different than what NYC’s been like). While I love Europe, we do just really love Mexico. It’s the hospitality, the food, and the climate that keep us coming back for more vacations than I can count. Plus, different from Europe, A/C and ice cubes are aplenty! Cabo is so easy to get to with a direct flight and the hotels are all just a quick drive from the airport. We chose Esperanza because I love the Auberge hotel brand, it’s the only hotel in Cabo with a private beach and it’s known for having amazing food, which, if I’m honest is the main draw of any travel destination I’m picking.

I’ve been a fan of Auberge Collection for years. Before starting Fewer Finer, I worked in luxury hospitality marketing for an agency called Spherical as the Lead Producer. I would travel to hotels producing photoshoots for their websites, social media, and marketing. In my last year there, Auberge became a client and I wish I got to work with them more! My biggest client was Rosewood Hotels, and a fun fact that I get to brag about is that I’ve been to more Rosewood Hotels than anyone you know - I’ve gotten to stay at over 20 Rosewood properties around the world.

For our first babymoon, we went to Hacienda AltaGracia, another Auberge in Costa Rica and it stands as one of my top five favorite hotels of all time. If you ever have a chance to go, I can’t speak highly enough about it!

For this babymoon, given that it is our second one, we were taking it in the height of a very busy summer, and we are at a stage of life where we’re looking for something easy, seamless, and just relaxing, Esperanza was a perfect fit. Because of my relationship with the brand, I did get a discount on our stay. Of course, anything I ever share on here is a genuine recommendation and my honest take!

It was the ideal trip, just the right amount of time, and such a luxury to take a few days away! Below, I wanted to share a list of fifteen things (usually this letter focuses on just five things, but sometimes I want to share more!) I loved about the hotel. These are the kind of details every great hotel should consider! And after, a Five Fine Things list of favorite items I packed and loved for this trip!

1. Incredible Food - I knew the food here was going to be amazing. It’s hard to do Mexican food wrong if you’re using good ingredients and making authentic dishes, but the attention to detail here and the execution on every dish at every meal was such a score. We ate so well! Fresh seafood, more elevated dishes, some casual ones, poolside food that was exactly what you want to eat in that setting, so many incredible salads... One dish we got two days in a row that was probably the best thing we ate was birriería tacos - a Mexican dish that has slow stewed beef and melted cheese on a crispy taco that you eat with grilled onions and a consomé for dipping - the one at La Palapa blew us away!

   

2. Perfect Beds -A great hotel should have a perfect bed. Amazing sheets that feel brand new, plenty of pillows, and a feeling of abundance that is hard to mimic in your bed at home. That’s what they had here. The pillows were so great that I removed the three layers of pillow covers and protectors to find the brand and type. They were Kassatex (inner chamber 95% waterfowl feathers, 5% down, outer chamber 12% white down), and I think I’m going to buy two for our bed at home!

   

3. Turndown service twice a day - Any fine hotel should do twice a day turndown service, and it’s a luxury I really love. It’s so nice to come back from breakfast to a tight made bed, fresh towels, and all your toiletries organized on the counter. Here they did all that, plus at evening turndown there was always some kind of cute little treat or gift left on our bed. On the last night they gave us a baby hat embroidered with “Baby Podpirka” because they knew we were celebrating our babymoon!

   

4. Sunscreen Stations - this one is specific to beach/pool destinations but I thought it was so nice that at every pool and beach entrance they had these towel stations that also offered big pumps of sunscreen (30spf, 50spf, and aloe). While I love a fancy sunscreen, especially for my face, at a place like this where there is so much time in the sun and you’re reapplying constantly, it felt like a luxury to not have to think about buying more at the gift shop.

5. Good Fitness Programing and a Beautiful Gym - When I’m on vacation, working out is a luxury because I can take much more time for it than I can in my day to day. I love when a hotel has great fitness programing and I really appreciate a beautiful gym. The gym here was a big nice bright room full of top of the line equipment. Everyday there were a handful of classes to choose from. One day, I did yoga, and another we did a boot camp on the beach!

   

6. Private Beach Coves - If swimming in the ocean is something you want to do lots of, Cabo is not the destination for you because it’s on a peninsula that is rocky and can be quite rough so there’s not a lot of areas to safely swim. But, if you’re okay with little dips and love looking out on water that’s always changing and crashing into the rocks then I highly recommend. Personally, I was just captivated by the views here from the beaches and vantage points. I think a setting like this is so much more interesting to look out on than a flat ocean. There are two private beaches coves at Esperanza - we swam in the ocean every day, rented a beach cabana one day, and had a little private beach bonfire dinner set up by our concierge on another. It’s so nice to do these things tucked into a cliffside in total privacy.

   

7. Comal at Chileno Bay, the sister property - Because this was a short trip and we had been to Cabo before, we really delighted in the fact that we had no plans and nowhere to go. We didn’t feel like we needed to leave the resort to explore anything else, and were happy little resort rats the whole time! One thing that got us off the property was Esperanza’s sister hotel, less than 10 minutes down the road. We went for dinner one night at Comal, the awarded restaurant there where everything is cooked on a comal, the spanish word for flat top grill. The meal was outstanding! It was fun to get off property to see another hotel with a different more modern, sleek design, and to try another restaurant.

   

8. Spa amenities you can use with or without a treatment / appointment - This is something I really value in a hotel and I’ve noticed it is a bit more common these days. Sometimes you want to use the spa amenities without having an appointment booked and I think it’s so nice to be able to do that as a guest, especially if the spa amenities are worthwhile. Here you can use their relaxation room, the steam, hot tub and cold shower anytime!

   

9. Personalized details at the spa - We did a couples massage and I loved that the spa had a few thoughtful details that made the experience even better. First of all, when you check in they give you a menu of drink options to choose from for after your treatment and then they bring it to you in the post treatment room along with a plate of fruit, vegetable and nuts. I love that it felt more personal that you got to choose your drink and look forward to it after. They also had these little note cards that you filled out with questions about if you like your scalp massaged, what kind of pressure you liked, and a picture of the front and the back of a human figure that you could circle, or cross out in the areas you wanted them to work on or avoid. It was fun and easy to fill out and I feel like it made it much easier to communicate to the masseuse what you like and don’t like without any awkward conversation.

   

10. Great mocktails - Every menu here has an extensive mocktail menu. Honestly, pregnant or not, I love this because I didn’t drink very much. They didn’t just have mocktails, they had really amazing ones! Rich and I both loved the Orange Turmeric drink at Cocina Del Mar and had it multiple times, and I had many different versions of mint lime basil mocktails throughout our stay!

    

11. Real Pickleball Courts - Sadly, we were a little bit too lazy to make it to the tennis and pickleball courts, but they were beautiful. We took a nice morning walk every day and there was always a group of people playing pickleball shouting and having fun. I don’t play a ton of Pickleball, but I’ve often played on courts that are tennis courts with some extra lines and miniature nets set up but here they have proper pickleball courts that are beautiful. It’s so much better to play on a court specifically for pickleball so you’re not constantly setting up your lines and chasing after balls on a big court. Next time, I’m here, I definitely want to play!

12. An extensive breakfast buffet- Our room included daily breakfast and I loved that the buffet here was extensive with lots of options. I love the excitement of choosing from a big variety of things at a hotel breakfast. Despite the many options, I loved my breakfast so much the first day that I had the exact same thing everyday. It was a chia pudding, an egg and chorizo breakfast burrito, a slice of toasted banana bread, and a grapefruit/orange juice. Perfection!

    

13. A Sense of Fun - I want any hotel I go to have an aliveness. Hotels really are living breathing things and the energy matters. When a hotel feels fun, especially in Mexico, it’s such a bonus! I love that Esperanza had that with little touches that didn’t feel over orchestrated. The day we got there was the final for the World Cup and they turned one of the pools into a watch party. People were watching a big projector they set up from floats in the pool and they had a DJ there. One night, the restaurant had a woman set up who was rolling Cuban cigars which if you are cigar smoker is just a fun little activity. They come by the pool in the afternoon with popsicles. And they do live music on certain nights, which of course always feels fun too!

    

14. A Beautiful Magazine - “Auberge” is the name of the beautiful magazine the brand publishes with great editorial content and gorgeous photography. I spent an hour reading it on our room’s patio and loved how it covered fashion, food, interiors and storytelling, with more beautiful imagery, and better writing than most of the magazines I subscribe to! I love when a hotel brings you into their world in some way and this magazine did it so well. At the end it also lists all of their hotels and I realized I’ve only stayed at a few: Wildflower Farms (Hudson Valley), The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern (Los Olivos), and Hacienda Altagracia (Costa Rica). The others now top on my list for future trips are: The Dunlin (Charleston), Domaine Des Etangs (France), and any of their African properties!

    

15. Water and WiFi Everywhere - Another thing I really appreciated was that the hotel had amazing wifi everywhere which surprised me for such a large property. While of course I try to disconnect, I also really loved that even sitting on the beach I could read Substack or do things on my phone if needed. Also, there was no lack of water, which when you’re in a country where you aren’t drinking the tap is so nice to not have to go looking for. Every night in our room they left plenty of water bottles, they have water stations throughout the hotel, and all the restaurants serve nice bottled water when you sit down without asking for it!

1. Birkenstock 1774

   

   The 1774 collection for Birkenstock reimagines the brand's legendary silhouettes through the vibrant lens of the historical 1920s in Berlin (or so says my research!). I got mine a few years ago and I love that they’re different, feel luxe, but don’t have any designer branding. They’re a great shoe for a beach trip! They don’t make my exact pair anymore, but these ones are almost identical! I also like this dark brown pair, and this navy blue pair - both are on sale!

2. Hunting Season Clutch

   I got this clutch on The RealReal awhile back and loved having it on this trip. I found I needed something small just to hold my room key, phone, and sunglasses when going around the hotel and it was perfect for that. I packed it to use as my evening bag, which I did, but like that the woven detail made it work well for the day too. I love the simplicity and size of it. The all-leather version available on their site now is beautiful and comes in some great colors. And, here’s a lighter color available on The RealReal.

3. J.Crew Sadie Dress (now on sale!)

   

   I shared this dress (which is now on sale) in a recent round up and wanted to point it out again. If you’re looking for something for really hot temps, this is perfect. It’s the softest thinnest material, but I still feel like I can wear it with regular underthings (aka i't’s not see-through) and on our hottest night here, I was so happy to feel like I was wearing nothing! I now want it in the other print too!

4. Fave New White Tank

   

   I have been on a mission to acquire a few great tanks since that’s what I’m living in this summer. I recently got the Kana Tank from Vir Vita, a new-to-me brand and I really love it. It reminds me a lot of the Flore Flore “Jill” tanks I love, but is a bit more stretchy (the FF ones tend to be a thicker, stiffer material) and it’s longer (the FF ones are kind of cropped) - plus, importantly, they are half the price of Flore Flore. Since I needed something with more length and in a larger size than usual, I was hesitant to get more Flore Flore and I’m happy I discovered these. I love the thick straps that let you easily wear a concealed bra with them, and the seam detail up the back.

5. My Favorite Bikini

   

   My favorite bikini - pregnant or not is The Harley Bikini Top and Bottom from Solid & Striped. I’ve worn this all summer long and have had it for years and it’s still my favorite. For me, it’s the perfect cut, the easiest softest material, and simple in a way I find unfussy.

Thanks for reading!

- Madison