Sacha Pinto Goes to Playa del Carmen and Returns With a Masterclass in the Girls' Getaway

Before Sacha Pinto even packed her bags for Playa del Carmen, she was already doing what good travel advisors do: research. And what she found on social media was enough to give anyone pause. Images of sargassum, the brown seaweed that seasonally blankets stretches of the Riviera Maya coastline, flooded her feed with cautionary tones. The beach, those posts implied, was in trouble. What she found when she arrived told a different story.

"It was a good reminder that sargassum conditions can change daily and vary considerably depending on where you're staying," Pinto says. "One photo or video on social media captures a particular place at a particular moment. It doesn't necessarily tell the whole story." The ocean during her stay was swimmable, the atmosphere was relaxed, and the resort — the adults-only, all-inclusive Hyatt Vivid Playa del Carmen, booked through Air Transat — was unhurried and uncrowded, a benefit of travelling in the off-season that she hadn't fully anticipated.

That gap between expectation and reality sits at the heart of why Pinto, a travel advisor deepening her specialization in girls' getaways, made this trip in the first place. She and five friends, women she has known for more than 25 years, wanted sun, good dinners, and uninterrupted time together. She wanted all of that too, but she also wanted something else: to experience the destination and resort through the eyes of the travellers she loves helping most.

The Freedom Within Friendship

What she did not expect was that the most powerful lesson of the trip would have nothing to do with the resort's amenities list, and everything to do with how six old friends chose to spend their days. There was no itinerary. There was no obligation to move as a pack. On any given afternoon, someone might wander into the streets of Playa del Carmen, just steps from the resort, while another napped, strolled the beach, or settled into a stool at the swim-up bar. Then, without any coordination, they would find each other again for dinner.

"When you're normally juggling work, family, and everyday responsibilities, having both that connection with your girlfriends and permission to do absolutely nothing for a while felt like a luxury," Pinto reflects. "It was a really great blend of girl time and recharge time." It is a deceptively simple observation, but for anyone who has tried to plan a group trip and found the logistics slowly draining the joy out of it, the words carry real weight. The best girls' getaway, Pinto learned, is not about engineering perfect togetherness. It is about choosing a place that makes togetherness effortless when you want it, and invisible when you don't.

The walkability of the resort's location was central to that dynamic. Unlike more isolated all-inclusive properties tucked away from any town centre, Hyatt Vivid sits close enough to Playa del Carmen that guests can slip out independently, explore, and return without any group negotiation. For Pinto, this is now a non-negotiable consideration when planning trips for similar groups. "Experiencing that firsthand made me realize how important location and resort style are when planning a girls' trip," she says. "You need to think beyond whether a resort has a beautiful pool or good restaurants and consider how the group will actually spend their days."

The $60 Secret and the Matcha Frappuccinos

If there is one detail from the trip that Pinto returns to again and again when talking to clients, it is the cabana. For around sixty dollars USD, the group secured a full-day rental — service from ten in the morning until six in the evening, drinks and meals delivered throughout the day, a ten-minute massage for two included, and two additional loungers set up beside the cabana so all six women could be together. "For the price, I thought it was incredible value and something I would absolutely recommend to clients staying there," Pinto says. It is exactly the kind of insider knowledge that no brochure lists and no website photographs: the small upgrade that transforms a good day into a great one.

Then there were the matcha Frappuccinos. A minor detail, perhaps, but the kind of sensory memory that lodges itself permanently in a traveller's mind. Pinto found herself returning to them daily, a small ritual that became a marker of the trip's unhurried rhythm. The food more broadly was a genuine highlight, distinguished not by volume but by quality. This is a resort that trades on the latter, and for the right traveller, that distinction matters enormously.

Matching the Resort to the Traveller, Not the Other Way Around

Pinto is clear-eyed about who Hyatt Vivid Playa del Carmen is not for. Guests seeking an enormous buffet spread at every meal, high-energy entertainment around the clock, or deep-water swimming will likely find a better fit elsewhere. The shoreline is shallow, the property is intimate rather than sprawling, and the atmosphere leans toward relaxed sophistication rather than party-forward energy. None of that is a criticism. It is simply a fit question, and it is the question Pinto now believes every advisor should be asking first.

"There really isn't one 'best' resort," she says. "There's the resort that's the best fit for how you want to travel." That philosophy, sharpened by days of living it rather than reading about it, is reshaping how she approaches client conversations. She is asking deeper questions now, moving past amenity comparisons toward a more honest reckoning with how a group actually wants to spend its time. The distinction, she has come to understand, is everything.

The broader lesson she is carrying forward is equally simple and equally hard to learn from a screen. "More doesn't always mean better," Pinto says. "A resort doesn't need the biggest buffet, the most activities, or the largest property to deliver a great vacation." What it needs is alignment with the people inside it.

The Research That Becomes Wisdom

Pinto returned from Playa del Carmen with photographs, insider tips, and a clearer sense of the advisor she is becoming. Next on her agenda is a FAM trip to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, where she will once again trade the advisor's desk for firsthand experience, gathering the kind of contextual knowledge that no listing can replicate. After that, her personal wish list stretches further: Turks and Caicos, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia. The horizon, for someone who works in travel, only ever seems to widen.

But it is the quieter discovery from Playa del Carmen that she will carry longest into her work. Sitting by that cabana, matcha Frappuccino in hand, surrounded by friends she has known for a quarter century, Pinto understood something about her clients that no amount of product training could have taught her. The women who book girls' getaways are not simply looking for a beautiful pool or a good restaurant. They are looking for permission: to connect, to rest, and to be, briefly, free from everything else they are holding. Finding the resort that offers all three, for the specific group sitting across from her desk, is now the work she is most committed to getting right.