Is there actually such a thing as a perfect family trip? I mean, think about it… In March of 2021 we took our first trip as a family of four and it couldn’t have gone better. Kev and I are not people that like road trips, but with 2 kids and what felt like a uhaul full of “needed” stuff for a weeklong trip does not lend itself well to air travel. So, after a successful 13 hour drive to and from a beach front house in Florida, we realized while we’d still prefer a 2.5 hour flight, we could handle car trips just fine.
Unfortunately, going back to the beach house this summer was not in the cards, and not in the budget. In fact, I really didn’t realize how expensive travel for a family of four really was until I started digging around trying to find somewhere to go that was kid friendly, parent friendly, not cliché, not Disney and not in the same metro area as we live in… Our goal though was to try out a “resort” style vacation with the kids. We knew we could do a house rental just fine, but could we handle all being in one room, up an unknown number of floors, with one bathroom and dinner options only being take-out/ restaurants? Come to find out, yes, we can!
I think it’s important to understand something about what we personally look for when it comes to trips/ vacations, budget friendly to us may not be budget friendly for some. In our opinion, even with kids, there is a certain type of ambiance and service we want from our hotels/ resorts/ home rentals when we travel so that we can feel at ease. Additionally, we also differentiate trips and vacations. A vacation for us means having zero responsibility, doing what we want, when we want, whenever we want. A trip is a “vacation” for the kids, for work, or something that includes some form of scheduling/ responsibility.
So why am I doing this post? Because I’ve spent hours upon hours looking for website reviews, blog posts, social media content, etc. about family friendly easy vacations and came up with nada. Sure, there was Disney, Nickelodeon and some other what I call “cliché” resorts that I could spend an entire monthly paycheck on but that not what I wanted so I’m going to start sharing these vacations as we find them!
For this blog post, we’re visiting the JW Marriott Hill Country Resort in San Antonio Texas.
Let me start my review by saying that will we be coming back with the kids! This is a family resort. Like a true family resort where your kids can be kids and if your young ones are actin’ a mess, it’s ok and everyone around you for the most part understands. For the most part any, because we overheard an older lady who was on vacation with her husband, it seemed, getting upset at the pool because kids we’re splashing. I know it was her vacation too, but they have an adult only area. You read that right! If your kids are old enough, they have an adult only pool where it’s actually quiet, not that I really got to spend a ton of time there…
Also, this resort is home to the TPC golf course of the Valero Open. So if you have a golfer in the family, there is a premium golf course at the resort!
Let’s go over some of the amenities of this place that we saw/ experienced. Beyond the premium golf, the main attraction was their “River Bluff”/ water park. This was very neat and very well thought out. There are tons of pools for all ages, huge water slides, a lazy river, a legit sand play area with a zero entry into the children’s pool a small water park/ splash pad for little kiddos and a beautiful main pool for relaxing with the family. At $500+ a day, you can rent a cabana by the main pool or children’s pool, which, to be honest, I looked into prior to arriving because I just didn’t know how the seating and crowding would be. Ultimately, I did not go that route and there were no issues with getting chair in a place we wanted them. We did not have to get up at crack of dawn to get a spot either which was fantastic.
There is a bar/to-go restaurant in the pool area that you could either walk up to or order from the servers that are around the pool to help with anything you need. Outside beverages are not allowed in the pool area and they will check bags. Beach towels are available as well which is super handy because it’s one less thing to pack and deal with!
Food around the resort was over all good. They have 4 restaurants on site and a Starbucks. We ate at 3 of the 4 while visiting and had zero complaints. The only thing I found interesting is that they do not take dinner reservations. It’s all first come first serve. It rained one evening and we waited for an hour and a half to be seated. However, the resort makes it easy to have food delivered too which I thought was an awesome feature for the resort. They even put local restaurants for guests to order from on their resort website. The lower lobby of the resort has a bar with a ton of seating so the one night we ordered a pizza, we just took it there and had a nice family meal. Great news was that we weren’t the only ones doing this!
The room selection for this resort is awesome and the price range covered a lot of different budgets. You can really tell that when they designed the resorts, they had families in mind but were able to maintain the JW Marriott aesthetic to the resort.
We chose the executive king suite for our stay because it offered us the space we were looking for in a room. We brought breakfast and lunch items to try to help keep food costs down because you know it’s all overpriced. We also needed some division. Between having a napper, an early riser, and at least one adult wanting to sleep in at least a couple of times, sharing one sleeping space was not appealing. See all my pictures and video of the space below.
The service team there was really amazing, and I think that’s important to point out because sometimes at bigger resorts, it can be slow or even non-existent due to demand. We needed an extra bedding set for the pull-out bed in the living room, wine glasses and a cork screw because we brought wine.
There was only one thing that wasn’t ideal but absolutely were not a big deal. Our room was not cleaned when we were there. My guess is that it had something to do with staffing shortages and covid. Our biggest thing was trash but when calling the front desk, they said to just place any full bins outside the door. It was taken within an hour or two.
Overall, it was a great trip with our kiddos. When Kev says this is a place to come back to, you know that’s good because while he’s not hard to please, he generally doesn’t just throw that sort of thing out there.
I give this family resort a 9 out of 10.