How Palace Resorts got here
Nearly every large chain on this coast arrived from somewhere else. Palace is the exception: a Yucatán engineer's company that opened its first hotel in Cancún in 1984, when the city was barely a decade old, and grew up alongside it. Forty years later the same family owns hotels in Venice, Rome and the Maldives.
Founded 1984 · Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico · Run from Mérida, Yucatán · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1984
Beach Palace, and a city barely ten years old
José Antonio Chapur Zahoul opens his first hotel in the Cancún hotel zone. Cancún itself had only taken its first guests in the mid-1970s, a resort city planned from nothing on a sandbar, so this is a local engineer building in a destination that is still being invented rather than a European group arriving with a system already worked out. The name sets the pattern for everything after it.
- 1988
Cancún Palace
The second hotel, and the beginning of a formula: a descriptive word in front of Palace, and a promise of marble, abundance and a bit of theatre rather than rustic Caribbean simplicity. Sun, Moon, Playacar, Cozumel, Isla Mujeres, Aventura and Vallarta all follow.
- 1990
Sun Palace, and the inclusions get standardised
The former Cancún Puerta del Sol becomes Sun Palace, and the company works out what a Palace rate should actually cover. What emerges is unusually maximal for the period: à-la-carte restaurants, premium spirits, room service around the clock at many properties, in-room liquor dispensers, double whirlpool tubs, entertainment, taxes and tips. The dispenser and the two-person tub become the signature, giving an ordinary room a bit of honeymoon-suite excess.
- 1996
Moon Palace changes the scale
Cancún's hotel zone is a narrow strip between the Caribbean and the Nichupté lagoon, which caps how big anything on it can get. Moon Palace is built south of it, on a large tract of beachfront nearer the airport, and that decision is the company's most consequential: with room to spread, it becomes a near self-contained destination with a 27-hole Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course, convention space, and eventually three internal sections in Sunrise, Nizuc and The Grand.
- 2005
Le Blanc, and the top of the range
In August the company rebuilds the former Hotel Sierra Cancún as Le Blanc Spa Resort: adults-only, around 260 suites, butler service, restrained neutral design and a large spa. Rather than stretching the family-friendly Palace name upmarket until it stopped meaning anything, the Chapurs gave the luxury end a different name and let it behave differently. A second Le Blanc opens in Los Cabos in 2018.
- 2011
Several Palaces become Hard Rocks
Hard Rock International and Palace announce that Cancún Palace, Vallarta Palace and the Aventura properties will convert to all-inclusive Hard Rock Hotels, with Moon Palace Punta Cana becoming Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Punta Cana. Cancún Palace completes first, in 2012. The converted resorts are owned and run by RCD Hotels, a separate Chapur family hotel company led by Roberto Chapur Duarte, which is why the Hard Rock all-inclusives and the Palaces have always shared so much design and operational DNA.
- 2015
Out of Mexico, into Ocho Rios
Palace buys the Sunset Jamaica Grande in 2014, renovates it heavily and reopens it as Moon Palace Jamaica, its first hotel outside Mexico. It is a conversion of a landmark rather than a build, and much more compact than the Cancún campus: a central position on Ocho Rios Bay, with new interiors, restaurants, children's facilities, a nightclub and a FlowRider surf simulator added.
- 2017
The Grand, a luxury resort inside a megaresort
The Grand at Moon Palace Cancún opens with about 1,300 rooms, which rules out calling it intimate, and applies the resort-within-a-resort idea at a scale nobody else was trying: its own restaurants, bars, spa, pools, waterpark, bowling alley and nightlife, plus the run of the adjoining Sunrise and Nizuc sections. The access runs one way, which is the point of it.
- 2022
A Cancún company buys Venetian palaces
In November, Palace acquires 75 per cent of Baglioni Hotels & Resorts, the Italian luxury group with hotels in Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Sardinia, London and the Maldives, and takes full ownership in 2023. A company built on prepaid Mexican beach holidays now owns historic European city hotels sold by the room, which is about as wide a stylistic range as anyone in this business has.
- 2024
The Palace Company
The parent takes a new name, announced from Mérida, and the brands sit under it separately: Palace Resorts, Moon Palace Resorts, Le Blanc Spa Resorts and Baglioni. Palace Resorts did not go anywhere, it simply stopped meaning the whole company, which is the same move Fiesta made in 2012 except that Fiesta gave up its old name entirely.
What the dates leave out
The Mexican one
Iberostar, RIU, Barceló, Meliá and Bahia Principe are Spanish. Sandals and Couples are Jamaican. AMResorts was American. Palace is Mexican, from the Yucatán, and it is the only company of its size on this coast that learned the business in Cancún rather than importing a model into it. That shows up in what it competes on: it never had a European tour operator feeding it guests, so it built the inclusions, the wedding business and the membership programme to fill its own rooms.
The first hotel named everything after it
Beach Palace gave the company its entire vocabulary. Cancún Palace, Sun Palace, Moon Palace, Playacar Palace, Cozumel Palace, Isla Mujeres Palace, Aventura Palace, Vallarta Palace, and eventually The Palace Company itself. Forty years of naming decisions were settled in 1984.
Leaving the hotel zone was the big call
Everything Moon Palace is able to be follows from a decision about land. The Cancún strip is narrow, so hotels on it go up rather than out and share a beach with their neighbours. Moving south to a large parcel bought the space for a golf course, convention halls, several distinct resorts and the kind of concert and incentive-group business that simply will not fit in a conventional Cancún hotel. Guests notice it as scale; it started as geography.
Some Hard Rocks are former Palaces
The guitars are newer than the buildings. Hard Rock Cancún, Vallarta, Riviera Maya and Punta Cana all began as Chapur family resorts, and RCD Hotels, the separate family company that owns and operates them, developed much of what the all-inclusive Hard Rock formula became. If a Hard Rock room feels oddly familiar after a Palace stay, that is why.
What a resort credit is, and is not
Palace is known for headline credits, often advertised at a thousand dollars or more per stay, spendable on spa treatments, tours, golf, romantic dinners, photography and the gift shop. It is not cash: it comes with restrictions, limited availability and, usually, tax or service charge payable by the guest. Read as a discount it disappoints; read as an invitation it works, because it pushes people toward experiences they would otherwise skip and keeps the spending inside the resort. Worth knowing which of the two you are being offered before comparing rates.
The membership business
Alongside the hotels, Palace built a substantial long-term travel membership operation under names such as Palace Premier and Palace Elite, offering preferential rates, bonus nights, credits, upgrades and referral benefits. It supplies repeat guests and revenue up front, and it is the reason a check-in may come with an invitation to a presentation. Guests report the pitch as anything from unnoticeable to persistent, so the practical note is simply that attending is optional and declining is fine.
Still family owned, in both directions
No Hyatt, no Marriott, no Hilton and no private-equity platform. The founder is honorary president and the next generation, including Gibrán and Jabib Chapur, run it. What has changed is the shape: where a Spanish or Jamaican founder's children often inherited individual hotels, this generation inherited a corporate group with four brands on two continents.
Everything we read on Palace Resorts
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.