
Excellence Punta Cana Review – Things to Do
Choppy Waves at the Beach, Excellence Punta Cana
This is part 2 of a 3 part series on our trip to Excellence Punta Cana. In this blog post, I will focus on the beach, entertainment, and the excursions at Excellence.
In order to keep the blog posts to a reasonable length, I’ve divided this blog series into these 3 blog posts.
- Excellence Punta Cana Review – Accommodations and Dining
- Excellence Punta Cana Review – Things to Do
- Photography Opportunities at Excellence Punta Cana
In addition to the beach and pool, Excellence has a casino, disco, nightly shows, and an ecological garden. There is also horseback riding, non-motorized water sports, and shops. You can also purchase excursions outside the resorts to places like Santo Domingo.

Beach Chair and Tiki Umbrella, Excellence Club Beach
The Beach at Excellence Punta Cana
We enjoyed the beach at Excellence Punta Cana. The beach was kept very clean at Excellence. The staff cleaned up the beach daily and even sifted the sand to ensure there was no debris. The beach seemed safe to walk or run on even past the end of the resort. Outside the resort, you will have the occasional local try sell you something or encourage you to visit their shop.
The beach is an excellent place to see or photograph the sunrise. If you head out to the beach just before sunrise and look to the right you will see the sunrise. If you head to the right along the beach there is a point in the beach that is a great place to watch the sunrise.
The surf was rough each day of our 4 day visit; the red flag was out each day. The concierge informed us that there is no lifeguard on duty, so it was swim at your own risk. However, I did see several people watching with radios who were blowing whistles and telling people to come back closer to shore.
The private beach for the Excellence Club was terrific. It had cabanas, and lounge chairs with tiki umbrellas. There were also beach waiters in the Excellence Club area that will take your drink order or even deliver pizza.
They resort did not seem to enforce the private beach for the Excellence Club members only. The beach concierge did not check room numbers for Excellence Club members. After the first day, we found out that people started putting books, towels and other items on the lounges before breakfast to reserve their spot.
Make sure you do the same or all the chairs with umbrellas may be taken. The beach concierge also seemed helpful in finding a spot for people.

Ecological Park
The resort also has an ecological park with jogging and walking trails. The park has several ponds and feeder boxes that they stock with bread for the guests to feed the ducks and birds. This is a great place for birders and nature photographers. I saw and photographed several species of birds that I just don’t see in the Midwest United States. I’ll talk more about the birds and photo ops at the ecological park in part 3 of this blog.
Entertainment
There were shows every night we were there. They put on a burlesque show, Brazilian show, and a Circ du Soleil type show. The shows start around 9:30 each night. The seating usually started to fill up about an hour prior to the show.
There are two bars adjacent to the show area and they usually have a saxophone musician playing live music prior to the show. So if you want a good seat for the show, get there early, grab a drink, and listen to the live music.
Excursions
There was so much to do at the resort that we didn’t go on any excursions. There were quite a few excursions to choose from that mostly cost $100 per person or less. One of the excursions that looked interesting for photographers was a tour of Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic. This was an all day excursion leaving the resort at 6:20am and returning around 7pm. The tour cost $100 per person. We only stayed at Excellence for 4 nights. If we had stayed longer at the resort, this would have been the excursion we would have taken.
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