Hotel spotlight: Barcelo Tambor, Costa Rica

Barcelo Tambor is an all-inclusive beach resort in Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. The region is a little out of the way. It’s a 3 hour drive from the airport in Liberia, and 4 hours away from San Jose. However, if you are in the area for it’s nautical attractions (Isla Tortuga snorkelling, whale-watching, surfing, or – the entire reason that brought us to Nicoya – bioluminescence tours), Barcelo Tambor is a local-centric, budget-friendly resort with the most kids-friendly strip of beach we encountered anywhere in Costa Rica.

Duration: 3 nights

Traveled as: a family

Travel type: pleasure

Combined with: a DIY cross-country tour across Costa Rica!

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I think we might be the first (in 2024) to ever write a post about Barcelo Tambor, even though the resort is over 30 years old. Barcelo Tambor sees a lot of local visitors and families, as well as larger tour groups coming through (mostly older travellers), but relatively few individual “foreign” tourists. The available reviews online for Barcelo Tambor are… mixed. And to be clear, I would never recommend travelling all the way to Costa Rica just to stay in an all-inclusive resort. But if you are passing through the Nicoya Peninsula, Barcelo Tambor is a decent option at an unbeatable price to unwind for a few days, enjoy the beach, and embark on tours and day trips. We paid *less* for our family of four at this all-inclusive per night than we did at most of our other hotels in Costa Rica!

Hotel features

Location

Barcelo Tambor is about 25 minutes outside the town of Paquera, along the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. It is one of the few all-inclusive resorts in the area, located right along the Tambor beach. As we mentioned, it is a fair distance from either of Costa Rica’s main airports, and not readily accessible by public transportation. (Hence why many travellers will come by tour bus.) With a car, you can reach other popular destinations in Guanacaste (“north” Nicoya) like Samara and Tamarindo in about 2.5 hours. To connect to the “mainland”, you can either drive around the Nicoya Gulf, or you can take a 1 hour ferry from Paquera to Puntarenas, and continue to your destination (along the pacific coast to Jaco, Dominica, Manuel Antonio, etc, or to Monteverde, Arenal, or San Jose).

Rooms

There are 402 rooms, mostly centrally located around the main pool/dining areas in two story buildings. You can opt for either a king bed or 2 double beds. The rooms are air-conditioned, and each room has a private terrace or balcony.

There is a “premium” option, which are rooms with seaside views, and guests have access to a private lounge and preferential dining bookings. There are 4 suites available in the premium category, which include a living room.

Our thoughts: We stayed in a “standard” room. It was nothing fancy, but it was clean and met all our needs. It had a mini-bar stocked with soft drinks, air conditioning, and wifi access. We enjoyed the iguanas that were constantly coming up to our terrance.

Cost

The rates vary, of course, and sometimes you can find deals on their website. For our 3 night stay, we paid approximately $750 USD! (This was in 2024, during high season in March.)

Dining

Barcelo Tambor has 1 main buffet-style restaurant, El Tucan, and 1 “grill”/snack bar, El Palenque. There are 3 a-la-cart restaurants open for dinner: El Rancho (steakhouse), Miyako (a Japanese restaurant), and Trattoria (Italian, is converted from El Palenque in the evenings). All the restaurants are open-air. There is always a nice breeze at night, but sometimes felt stifling during the day.

There are several bars scattered throughout the resort and beach area, and a smoothie bar at El Palenque. The bars served all the standard drinks, but had a few cocktails that were unique which we enjoyed.

Our thoughts: The buffet food was very average. There was a good range of options but the quality was so-so. The kids’ ice cream was also consistently half-melted due to heat. It was fine for a few days, and a nice change from having to plan every meal, but any longer and I feel we would have gotten fed up. We only made dining reservations for one night at El Rancho. The service was attentive and we enjoyed the breeze right by the ocean, but the steak was still average, and the rest felt like the same buffet food with better presentation.

Our favourite to hit up was the smoothie bar. It was nice for the kids to be able to order something besides virgin Pina coladas, and a non-alcoholic treat for us adults, too! We enjoyed hanging out at the grill with our burgers and smoothies, while Big S caught up on South American soccer on the TV.

Pools

There are 2 large pools, connected by a waterfall curtain. There is also a kids pool/splash area.

Our thoughts: We did not spend a ton of time at the pool, as our kids were obsessed with the beach. We found that most of the guests “saved” their loungers for the entire day. If you want to chill by the pool and did not grab a lounger in the morning, it is next to impossible to find one. With that being said, the pool never felt over-crowded. The pool has beach/ocean views, which was lovely.

Beach

Barcelo Tambor has a very long stretch of beach that is protected in a little bit of a cove. Some areas of the beach itself are quite rocky from ocean debris washing ashore, but the water is shallow and sandy.

Our thoughts: This was hands down the kids’ favourite thing about Barceló Tambor. The beach was never crowded. There are no cabanas/umbrellas, but plenty of loungers and palm trees that offer shade. (Also a favourite for the parrots that swoop by.) There is no beach-side bar, but it was only a short walk to the pool bar. The only downside was there are no bathrooms by the beach (or pool, for that matter) – if you had to use the bathroom, you had to go back to your room, or to reception.

The best part about this bit of ocean is the kids could actually swim! We found most of the beaches we visited in Costa Rica had pretty strong currents and large waves. The kids couldn’t actually get out very far and we had to keep a constant eye on them in case they got swept out (which Lil S almost did several times). Since Tambor beach is a little bit recessed, the waves were way calmer, but still enough the kids could boogie-board all day long. During low tide, you can walk out a loooong way.

The kids pretty much spent all their time at the resort on the beach. In the morning they’d go out hunting for shells, during the day they’d swim or boogie board, and stay all the way to sunset.

On-site activities

For wellness, Barcelo Tambor has a spa, which also has a small gym.

For sports, there are basketball courts and tennis courts, a soccer field, and soccer and volleyball nets set up on the beach. There is also archery (there is an age limit, so Big S was disappointed he did not qualify for this). Barcelo Tambor is also located right next to a golf course.

For water activities, you can rent boogie boards.

The resort has a playground and a trampoline for kids. There is also a kids “club” area with table tennis and games.

There is a “bird sanctuary”, a garden with a number of parrot species, and a butterfly garden (though we did not see any butterflies here).

Our thoughts: We did not see many people using the amenities. Big S borrowed a soccer ball once or twice, but by far the kids made the most use out of the boogie boards. We did go for a walk around the bird sanctuary – the kids enjoyed seeing all the different parrots up close.

On-site entertainment

Compared to other all-inclusive resorts, there is not much of a set schedule here – no one offering dance classes or pool-side games. In fact, not all of the staff speak English! (We did not have issues with any of the servers or bartenders, but did have a mix-up checking in as the receptionist didn’t check in the kids, and we did not figure this out until the next day.)

We only saw shows in the evenings at the main stage. The pre-dinner show was always empty. The post-dinner show seemed to be popular with the local crowd, but we did not stay for those.

How we incorporated Barcelo Tambor into our itinerary

If you are looking for an all inclusive resort vacation, we would NOT recommend Barcelo Tambor. There are many more luxurious, more conveniently located resorts in Guanacaste.

We ended up in this area of Costa Rica as we were coming from Monteverde, and *really* wanted to take a bioluminescence tour in Paquera Bay. We had about a week along the Pacific coast, and planned to eventually make our way down to Manuel Antonio. At first, we planned to stay overnight after our tour and leave Nicoya the next day for a more popular spot along the way to Manuel Antonio, but decided to spend a couple more days exploring the area.

This area of the Nicoya Peninsula is a little less developed compared to many tourist areas in Costa Rica. There are lots of secluded beaches and little towns along the way, perfect for beach hopping. We spent a morning exploring pristine beaches where we were the only ones there! It’s a great area for fishing and snorkelling, especially if you take a day tour to Isla Tortuga.

We are not *usually* all-inclusive people, but after adventuring from Tortuguero to Arenal to Monteverde, we were looking forward to just chilling on the beach and not having to worry about food! Barcelo Tambor is really the main all-inclusive resort in the area. We had stayed at a Barcelo property before, and felt comfortable staying with them again.

Our final thoughts

Barceló Tambor is a low-key resort that is more charming than luxurious. The food was NOT a highlight, and we had far better meals in Costa Rica (with that being said, we stopped at a soda in Monteverde where the cook left the plastic ring on Daniel’s burger, so it definitely wasn’t the worst, either).

The selling points for us was the beautiful strip of kid-friendly beach (this may have been the kids’ favourite Costa Rica memory of the entire trip!), and the excellent price point. The smoothies was a happy surprise! We enjoyed our stay. Although we would not specifically recommend it for families visiting Costa Rica (unlike many of our other wow-worthy experiences), Barceló Tambor may be worth checking out if you are passing through this area.