How Excellence got here
There is no famous founding hotelier here, which is unusual for this category and is the most interesting thing about the company. Excellence is a joint investment by three family businesses, two of them from Mallorca and Menorca, and the third best known in America for staging jousting tournaments over dinner.
Founded 2000 · Punta Cana, Dominican Republic · Run from Cancún, Quintana Roo · Last reviewed August 2026
- 2000
Excellence Punta Cana
The first resort opens on the Dominican coast that Barceló, RIU and Iberostar had reached in the previous fifteen years, and it is pitched at the opposite end of the market from what was there. Adults only, all-suite, a lot of à-la-carte restaurants, lagoon pools, room service included, an upgraded Excellence Club tier inside the resort, and at many properties no wristband and no need to reserve a table. The proposition is that the prepaid holiday and the upscale holiday are not opposites, which in 2000 was a claim that needed making.
- 2004
Into Mexico
Excellence Riviera Cancún opens, taking the format to the coast south of Cancún where the Spanish groups and the Mexican ones were both building hard.
- 2007
Playa Mujeres, early
The group moves into the strip north of Cancún while it is still an emerging resort district rather than an established one. That decision is what makes everything after it possible, because it gives the company room to put three different resorts within a short distance of each other.
- 2011
La Amada becomes Beloved
A smaller hotel opened at Playa Mujeres in 2009, selling rooms on a European plan with all-inclusive as an optional extra. Enough guests took the option that the resort was repositioned in 2011 as Beloved, and later became couples-only. It is a rare case of a hotel being told what it was by the people staying in it.
- 2015
Finest, for the guests who had children
An adults-only brand has a built-in problem: its most loyal customers eventually cannot book it. Finest Playa Mujeres opens in February with the oversized suites, elaborate pools and club-level areas kept intact, and family suites, children's facilities and multigenerational rooms added. It is the same manoeuvre AMResorts made when it followed Secrets with Dreams, arrived at from the same pressure.
- 2016
Excellence El Carmen
A more contemporary counterpart to the original Punta Cana resort, on the same Dominican coast, sixteen years later.
- 2018
Jamaica
Excellence Oyster Bay opens on a private peninsula near Montego Bay, the group's first resort outside the Dominican Republic and Mexico, and the first time the format is tested in a country with an all-inclusive tradition of its own.
- 2019
The Excellence Collection
The parent renames itself, which sounds cosmetic and is not: by this point there are three brands doing three different jobs, and Excellence Group Luxury Hotels & Resorts made the adults-only brand sound like the whole company. The Collection is the container for Excellence, Beloved and Finest.
- 2021
Finest leaves Mexico
Finest Punta Cana opens, giving the family brand a second country and putting an all-ages Excellence Collection resort on the coast where the company started.
- 2025
Excellence Coral Playa Mujeres
A large new adults-only resort beside the group's existing Playa Mujeres properties, which now hold all three brands within a short distance of each other.
- 2027
Announced: Finest Riviera Cancún
The family brand gets a second Mexican resort, announced rather than open, which is the honest way to carry it until it is.
What the dates leave out
One of the owners stages jousting tournaments
The Excellence Collection says plainly that its resorts are a joint investment between Medieval Times, Zafiro Hotels and Viva Hotels. Medieval Times is the MT Group, which has spent decades running dinner-show castles across the United States and Canada, along with Prinsotel in Mallorca and the Captain Hook pirate cruises in Cancún. So the same business circle behind knights, jousting and a replica Spanish galleon helped build one of the Caribbean's best-known romantic resort brands, which is not a sentence that fits any other company on this site.
Another Mallorca story, in disguise
Zafiro Hotels took its name in 2017 when the Viva Hotels & Resorts group reorganised and passed control to the next generation, and Viva's hotels were on Mallorca and Menorca. So two thirds of Excellence's ownership traces to Balearic family hotel businesses, the same islands that produced Iberostar, RIU, Barceló and Meliá. The difference is the strategy: where those four went to the Caribbean at volume, this one went with very few properties aimed high.
Adults-only and couples-only are not the same thing
Worth knowing before booking, because the words get used interchangeably. Excellence resorts are adults-only: friends, groups and solo travellers are all welcome as long as everyone is an adult. Beloved Playa Mujeres is couples-only, which is a narrower door and a quieter resort. Couples in Jamaica draws the same distinction and has done since 1978.
Three brands inside one district
Playa Mujeres is where the company works out what it thinks. Excellence for adults who want a full-sized resort, Beloved for couples who want something small, Finest for families and several generations at once, all within a short drive. Because the destination is held constant, the differences between them are purely about mood, scale and who else is there, which is an unusually clean experiment. Read in order they also track a life: the honeymoon, the quiet week away, the return with children and grandparents, which is the same reason AMResorts followed Secrets with Dreams.
Small on purpose
The portfolio is tiny beside RIU, Iberostar or Meliá, and that looks deliberate. The owning families work in development and real estate as well as hotel management, so the company builds properties around its operating concept rather than buying existing hotels and fitting the concept to them afterwards. It is the slower route, and it is why the resorts are so consistent with each other.
Where it is actually run from
We give Cancún as the headquarters because the group's own materials consistently place it there, but it is worth stating the limit of that: legal, reservations and payment functions also run through offices elsewhere in Mexico and in Miami. Cancún is the principal operational base rather than the single address everything happens at, and a company owned jointly by three families in two countries was never going to have a tidy answer to this question.
Everything we read on Excellence
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.