Grand Decameron Panama, A Trademark All Inclusive Resort

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Quick Verdict

Grand Decameron Panama is the largest all-inclusive resort in the country and, by a comfortable margin, the cheapest genuine one. Eight hundred and fifty-two low-rise rooms sit in tropical gardens on Playa Blanca at Farallon, about 90 minutes west of Panama City, and the official rate starts at roughly $112 per person per night with everything included. For that you get nine restaurants, six pools, a three-lane waterslide, an outdoor cinema, a nightclub, tennis and multipurpose courts, non-motorized watersports and a nightly show program.

It has been open since 1997 and now flies under Wyndham’s Trademark Collection while remaining Decameron-operated — which means you earn Wyndham Rewards points on an all-inclusive stay, an unusual perk at this price. Booking.com guests give it 7.6 out of 10 across more than 3,000 reviews, with cleanliness and comfort both at 8.1 and value for money the weakest headline number at 7.4.

That spread tells you exactly what this resort is. It is clean, it is enormous, the beach is excellent, and the staff get consistently good marks. It is also dated in stretches, the food is inconsistent from venue to venue and night to night, and the standard drinks package covers domestic labels only. If you are a family of five or a group of twelve looking for the most resort per dollar in Central America, book it. If you want a polished four-star experience, spend the extra at Riu Playa Blanca next door.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
From roughly $112 per person per night, fully inclusive	Standard plan is domestic spirits only
Nine restaurants, no reservation surcharge	Food quality varies venue to venue and night to night
Six pools plus a three-lane waterslide (230/196/43 ft)	Dated furnishings in some wings — 1997 construction
Cleanliness 8.1 and comfort 8.1 from 3,000+ Booking.com reviews	Value for money scores only 7.4
Adults-only pool for guests who want quiet	Official site disagrees with itself on open venue counts
Earns Wyndham Rewards points	852 rooms over a huge site — expect the shuttle bus
Outdoor cinema, nightclub, tennis, watersports all included	Wi-Fi rated 7.2 and patchy away from the lobbies
Excellent, wide Playa Blanca beach frontage	Airport shuttle is chargeable and must be pre-booked

The Resort at a Glance

Detail	Info
Rooms	852, in low-rise buildings, all with balcony or terrace
Restaurants	9 — 2 buffets (Atlantis, Pacifico) plus Panamai, El Canal, Cafe Med, El Pilon, Esquina Asiatica, Mezcal and Cowboy Steakhouse
Bars	6-8 depending on the source: two lobby bars, Mezcal, Nega Nega, Las Congas, El Pilon and the disco
Pools	6, including a children’s pool and an adults-only pool
Waterslide	Three flumes: 230 ft, 196 ft and 43 ft
Beach	Direct frontage on Playa Blanca, Farallon — private beach area, rated 8.5 by Booking.com guests
Address	Avenida Principal Farallon, Km 115, Carretera Interamericana, Penonome, Cocle
Airport	Rio Hato / Scarlett Martinez (RIH) is minutes away; Tocumen (PTY), Panama City, roughly 120 km / 90 minutes
Opened	1997; now branded “A Trademark All Inclusive Resort” under Wyndham
Adults-only?	No — family resort, but with one adults-only pool
All-inclusive	Yes, true all-inclusive. A paid All-Inclusive Plus upgrade adds premium and imported liquor
Guest score	7.6/10 on Booking.com from 3,059 reviews
Check-in / out	3:00 PM / 12:00 PM

Rooms and Suites

Garden View and Ocean View

The base categories are Garden View and Ocean View, both available with one king bed or two doubles, and both with a private balcony or terrace with chairs and a table. Standard fit-out is what you would expect: air conditioning, cable TV with USB ports, safe, phone, and a bathroom with shower and hairdryer. There are no bathtubs and no in-room minibar at this tier.

The Ocean View upgrade is genuinely worth it here, and not only for the Pacific sunsets. The ocean-facing buildings are the ones closest to the beach and the main pool complex, which on a site this large translates into a materially shorter walk to everything. Garden View rooms in the outer wings are the ones most likely to generate the “we needed the shuttle bus” reviews.

Garden View Plus and Ocean View Plus

The Plus categories are the resort’s soft-upgrade tier, and the value math is straightforward: you get a minibar stocked with sodas and beers and restocked daily, welcome snacks, a wardrobe, a desk, a sofa bed and an in-room safe. For a family, the sofa bed alone often makes the Plus room cheaper than booking a second room, and the daily-restocked beer fridge is the kind of small thing that stops you walking fifteen minutes to a bar at 11pm.

Note that Plus rooms are not the same thing as the All-Inclusive Plus meal plan — Decameron uses the word twice for different products. The room category gets you the minibar and sofa bed; the meal plan upgrade gets you premium liquor, reserved areas and priority service. Make sure your booking specifies which one you are paying for.

Our pick

Ocean View Plus with two double beds. It is the shortest walk to the beach, it comes with the stocked minibar and sofa bed, and for a family of four it usually undercuts two Garden View rooms. Recurring 2025-2026 reviews describe the Plus-section rooms as spacious with good air conditioning and comfortable beds — noticeably warmer feedback than the resort average, which is a hint about where the refurbishment money has gone.

Food and Dining

The buffets: Atlantis and Pacifico

Two buffet restaurants run breakfast, lunch and dinner. Atlantis is the larger, American-leaning operation and is where most guests eat breakfast; Pacifico covers the same three services on the other side of the resort. Service hours are precise and worth knowing, because on a property this size you will not casually stroll in late: breakfast 7:00-10:30, lunch 12:00-14:30, a daytime snack service 11:00-17:00 running alongside lunch, a coffee-and-pastries break 17:00-18:30, dinner 18:30-22:00 and a night snack 23:00-02:00 timed to the disco.

Booking.com guests rate the breakfast “good”, and cleanliness of the eating areas comes up positively in recent reviews. The complaint that recurs just as often is repetition — seven nights of buffet here will feel like seven nights of buffet.

The a la carte restaurants

Seven themed restaurants sit alongside the buffets, and none of them carries a surcharge — reservations only:

• El Pilon — Panamanian specialties, right on the beach. This is the one repeat guests name unprompted, and the one to prioritize.
• Cowboy Steakhouse — grill and cuts, open across all three meal services.
• Panamai — Italian, also serving breakfast and lunch.
• Mezcal — Mexican, dinner only, doubling as a bar.
• Esquina Asiatica — Asian, dinner only.
• Cafe Med — Mediterranean, dinner only, beside an infinity pool.
• El Canal — seafood, dinner only. Decameron’s own website confusingly also markets a seafood venue as La Pesca del Dia; assume one seafood restaurant under whichever name is on the door that season.

Here is the honest caveat. Decameron’s own site lists “six a la carte and two buffet” in one place and “eight a la carte and two buffet” in another, and Booking.com counts nine restaurants total. That inconsistency is not sloppiness so much as an accurate reflection of how the resort operates: venues rotate open and closed depending on occupancy. In low season, do not count on all nine being available on any given night, and book what you want early through the reception desks.

Bars and drinks

Between six and eight bars operate depending on season: two lobby bars, plus Mezcal, Nega Nega, Las Congas, El Pilon and the disco. Bar service runs continuously from 9:00 to 02:00, with a hydration station (water, coffee, tea) covering 02:00-07:00. Non-alcoholic drinks start at 7:00 with breakfast.

Read this part carefully. Decameron’s own FAQ states that the standard plan includes “unlimited domestic beverages”, and that the All-Inclusive Plus plan is the one that “includes all the drinks of the regular plan plus premium drinks and imported liquors”. Elsewhere the site’s inclusions list says “domestic and imported alcoholic beverages”. The safe assumption — and the one that matches guest reports — is that the standard plan pours Panamanian and regional brands, and that if you want Grey Goose or a single malt you are buying the Plus upgrade, currently about $18 per person per night more. Our guide to alcohol at all-inclusives explains why this two-tier structure has become the norm.

Food quality verdict

Genuinely mixed, and the reviews reflect it honestly. Recent guests praise variety and presentation at the buffets, single out El Pilon’s team as excellent, and note that the eating areas are kept scrupulously clean. Others describe the food as fine but forgettable, with quality dropping when the resort is full. At $112 per person a night, “fine but forgettable with two or three genuinely good venues” is a reasonable outcome. If food is the centerpiece of your vacation, this is not your resort.

Beach and Pools

The beach

Playa Blanca at Farallon is a wide, dark-gold Pacific beach that Booking.com guests rate 8.5, and the resort has a large private frontage on it. The setting is inside Panama’s Arco Seco — the dry arc — which is precisely why the resorts clustered here get significantly better weather than Panama City or the Caribbean side in the same months. The area was a military airbase in the 1980s and then a fishing village; the airstrip is now Rio Hato’s international airport, minutes away.

Swimming is generally easy, with gentle surf by Pacific standards. The tidal range is large, so the beach roughly doubles in width at low water and the swim gets a long walk out. Loungers, palapas and beach towels (collected from the Activity Center) are included.

Pools

Six pools, including a dedicated children’s pool and — a detail repeat guests appreciate — an adults-only pool, which is not something you expect at a family mega-resort in this price bracket. The headline feature is the three-lane waterslide, with flumes of 230, 196 and 43 feet; nothing else on Panama’s Pacific coast comes close. One of the a la carte restaurants, Cafe Med, sits beside an infinity pool for evening dining.

Guests consistently report the pools as clean and well maintained, with the cleaning schedule adhered to — an 8.1 cleanliness score across 3,000 reviews backs that up.

Activities and Entertainment

Daytime

The included program is unusually broad for the price. Non-motorized watersports cover windsurfing, paddleboarding, kayaking and sailboats. There is a tennis court and a multipurpose court for basketball, indoor soccer and volleyball (reservation required), a fitness center with cardio and strength machines, plus a daily activity roster of dance classes, yoga, aerobics, contests and workshops run by the recreation team. A golf course sits within about two miles.

The Decameron Explorer desk in each of the three lobbies sells excursions: El Valle de Anton’s crater town and Sunday market, the Panama Canal locks, Casco Viejo’s colonial center, and the Soberania and Chagres national parks. All chargeable.

Evening

Nightly shows rotate — cultural presentations, live music, dance. There is a disco running 23:00-02:00 with the night snack service timed to match, and an open-air cinema showing films under the stars, which is a lovely and genuinely unusual feature for an all-inclusive at this price. Two convention centers with capacity for a thousand people mean you may occasionally share the resort with a corporate group.

Kids’ club

The Kids Club is a supervised play space with a playground attached, running children’s activities including origami and play-dough workshops, face painting and treasure hunts. It is straightforward rather than elaborate — there is no dedicated teens’ program listed — but combined with the waterslide, the pools and the cinema, keeping children occupied here is not hard. There is a nurse station on site. For how this compares with the best family properties in the region, see our best all-inclusive resorts for families guide.

Spa and Wellness

Massage and spa services operate on site, including beachside massage cabanas, and are charged separately from the all-inclusive plan. The fitness center is included and open to all guests. There is no large destination spa here in the way there is at the luxury properties in Chiriqui — treatments are a pleasant add-on rather than a reason to book. Budget separately and expect Panamanian pricing, which is considerably gentler than Mexican or Caribbean resort spa rates.

What’s Included vs Extra

Included in the all-inclusive rate	Costs extra
Breakfast, lunch and dinner buffets (Atlantis, Pacifico)	Premium and imported spirits (All-Inclusive Plus upgrade)
All seven a la carte restaurants, reservation only, no surcharge	Spa and massage treatments
Daytime snacks 11:00-17:00, coffee break, night snack 23:00-02:00	Excursions via the Decameron Explorer desk
Domestic alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, bars 9:00-02:00	Airport shuttle (pre-booking required)
Overnight hydration station 02:00-07:00	Golf green fees at the nearby course
Non-motorized watersports: windsurf, paddle, kayak, sailboat	Motorized watersports
Beach and pool towels from the Activity Center	Room service, where offered
Tennis court, multipurpose court (reservation required), gym	Reserved pool and beach areas (part of Plus)
Kids Club, playground, nightly shows, disco, outdoor cinema	Priority restaurant service (part of Plus)
Wi-Fi and in-room safe	Nothing else material — this is a genuine all-inclusive

This is a true all-inclusive, not a package bolted onto a room rate. The one thing to be deliberate about is the All-Inclusive Plus tier: for roughly $18 more per person per night it adds premium and imported liquor, reserved areas and priority service. For a drinks-led group it pays for itself; for a family with young children it usually does not.

Pricing and How to Book

Price ranges by season

Season	Months	Typical nightly rate (2 adults, all-inclusive)
Green / low	May-mid December (excl. holidays)	$225-280
All-Inclusive Plus, low season	Same period	$260-320
High / dry	Mid-December-April	$290-380
Peak	Christmas/New Year, Carnival, Semana Santa	$400+

Decameron’s own published starting rate at the time of writing is US$112 per person per night for the standard plan and US$130 per person per night for All-Inclusive Plus, on a green-season booking window. Rates change with season and availability — confirm the current rate and exactly what’s included before you book.

Best time to book

The Arco Seco’s dry season, mid-December to April, is high season and fills with Panamanian, Colombian and North American families. Carnival (the four days before Ash Wednesday) and Semana Santa both sell the coast out; note also that Panama restricts alcohol sales nationally around Easter, though all-inclusive resorts hold permits to keep serving inside the property.

The value window is May to early December. Green season on this coast is nothing like green season in Bocas del Toro — the dry arc keeps rain comparatively brief and afternoon-shaped — and rates fall 25-30%. Book a la carte restaurants immediately on arrival at whichever of the three reception desks is nearest your room.

Where to book

Booking.com carries the property with live rates and more than 3,000 reviews, which makes it the easiest place to compare. Decameron’s own site regularly publishes per-person promotional rates that undercut the OTAs, particularly for longer stays, so it is worth checking both. If you are booking five rooms or more, different policies apply and full prepayment may be required. The cardholder must be one of the guests and must present the card used at check-in — Decameron enforces this.

Compared to Nearby Resorts

Hotel Riu Playa Blanca is the direct competitor and the quality upgrade. It is 573 rooms rather than 852, more consistently rated on food and housekeeping, and typically $60-100 more per night for two. If your priority is that the food is reliably good, pay the difference.

Las Perlas Playa Blanca — the resort still widely searched as Wyndham Grand Playa Blanca — is the small, quiet alternative on the same beach at 230 rooms, with a casino and a nightclub. It is also thinly reviewed under its current name, so it carries more risk.

Gran Evenia Bijao, formerly the Sheraton Bijao, is a few minutes east at Santa Clara with a nine-hole golf course in the same complex — a better fit if golf is part of the plan.

If you want to be near Panama City instead of 90 minutes west of it, Dreams Playa Bonita is 20 minutes from the capital. The full comparison lives in our Panama all-inclusive guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Grand Decameron Panama the same as Royal Decameron Panama?

Yes. It is the same resort at the same Farallon address; the property was rebranded from Royal Decameron Panama to Grand Decameron Panama, A Trademark All Inclusive Resort when it joined Wyndham’s Trademark Collection while remaining Decameron-operated. Some OTAs still carry the old name, and Booking.com’s URL for the property still reads “royal-decameron-golf-beach-resort”. If you see both names in your search results, they are one hotel.

Are drinks really included at Grand Decameron Panama?

Domestic ones, yes — unlimited, from 9:00 to 02:00, at every bar, pool and beach service point, plus an overnight hydration station. Premium and imported liquors are the exception: those sit behind the paid All-Inclusive Plus upgrade, which also adds reserved areas and priority service for roughly $18 more per person per night. Decameron’s own FAQ is explicit on this, even though another page of the same site is looser in its wording.

Do the a la carte restaurants cost extra?

No. All seven themed restaurants are included in the standard rate; you simply need a reservation, made at one of the three reception desks. The practical caveat is availability rather than cost — the resort rotates which venues open depending on occupancy, so in low season expect a subset of the nine to be running on any given night. Book on arrival day, not the night you want to eat.

Is it good for young children?

Yes, with realistic expectations. The three-lane waterslide, six pools including a dedicated kids’ pool, a playground, a Kids Club with craft and treasure-hunt activities, an outdoor cinema and a nurse station on site cover a lot of ground, and cribs are free on request. What it does not have is a teens’ program or an elaborate multi-age kids’ facility of the kind you find at Dreams Playa Bonita. Also factor in the scale: with 852 rooms and a shuttle bus, an Ocean View room close to the pool complex will make your week much easier.

How far is Grand Decameron Panama from Panama City?

About 120 km — roughly 90 minutes by road, longer if you hit traffic leaving the capital. Rio Hato’s Scarlett Martinez International Airport is only minutes away and is the far better arrival point when a flight is available. The resort does offer an airport shuttle, but it is a paid service and must be arranged with the hotel in advance; it is not bundled into the all-inclusive rate.

Is the resort dated?

In places, yes, and you should go in expecting that. The property opened in 1997 and, while cleanliness and comfort both score 8.1 from more than 3,000 Booking.com guests, “dated furnishings” is among the most common criticisms in 2025-2026 reviews, alongside inconsistent food and occasional venue closures. The Plus room categories appear to have had the most recent attention. At this price point, the trade is deliberate: you are buying nine restaurants, six pools and a waterslide rather than new furniture.

Final Verdict: 7.4 out of 10

Grand Decameron Panama does one thing better than any other resort in the country: it delivers an enormous amount of vacation for very little money. Nine restaurants with no surcharge, six pools, a three-lane waterslide, an adults-only pool, an open-air cinema, a nightclub, tennis, windsurfing and a nightly show — from around $112 per person per night, on a genuinely good Pacific beach inside Panama’s driest weather window. For a family of five, a multi-generational group or anyone counting the cost per head, that arithmetic is close to unbeatable in Central America.

The 7.6 Booking.com average from 3,059 guests is a fair and honest number, and so are its components: cleanliness 8.1, comfort 8.1, staff 7.7, value 7.4, Wi-Fi 7.2. What that describes is a well-run, spotlessly kept, thoroughly dated mega-resort where the food is fine, occasionally very good at El Pilon, and never exciting — and where the drinks you actually want may sit behind a paid upgrade.

Book it for scale, price and the waterslide. Do not book it expecting a boutique week. And if the food matters more to you than the price, walk 500 meters up the beach to Riu Playa Blanca and pay the difference. Full context on every genuine all-inclusive in the country is in our Panama guide, and if you are weighing tipping practice at Decameron-run properties, our all-inclusive tipping guide covers Latin American norms.