“There's a rooster somewhere behind the resort wall who has no concept of checkout time.”

The airport shuttle from Punta Cana International takes about twenty-five minutes, and the driver spends most of it narrating a baseball argument he's having on speakerphone. You pass a strip of colmados with plastic chairs spilling onto the road, a half-built pharmacy with rebar reaching skyward like fingers, and a fruit stand where a woman is slicing a mamey sapote the size of a football. The highway narrows. Palm trees close in. Then a gate, a guard who waves you through with the energy of a man who has done this four thousand times, and suddenly everything is marble and fountains and a lobby that smells like coconut and industrial floor cleaner in equal measure. The transition from the road to the resort is jarring in the way all-inclusives are designed to be — a hard cut from the real Dominican Republic to the version that fits on a wristband.

The Grand Palladium Palace is one of several properties sharing a sprawling campus along Playa de Bávaro, and if you've never been to a mega-resort complex, the scale is genuinely disorienting. There are golf carts. There is a map. You will need both. The check-in process involves a cold towel, a welcome drink that tastes like rum and optimism, and a wristband that becomes your identity for the next several days. Lose it and you're nobody.

The room where the girls trip actually happens

The room is big enough that four women and their collective luggage can coexist without anyone sleeping in a suitcase. Two queen beds, a balcony that faces a courtyard garden, tile floors cool enough to walk barefoot at any hour. The air conditioning works with the kind of aggressive enthusiasm you want in the Caribbean — leave it on high and you'll wake up reaching for a blanket. The bathroom is functional, not fancy: decent water pressure, soap that smells vaguely tropical, and a shower curtain that clings to your leg in a way that's universally annoying but not worth complaining about. The minibar restocks daily, which matters more than it should.

What defines the Grand Palladium isn't any single room — it's the sheer volume of options for doing nothing productively. There are something like eight restaurants, and the trick is learning which ones require reservations and which ones don't. The buffet at La Loma is the default, and it's better than you expect: a carving station, a Dominican rice-and-beans setup that locals on staff actually eat from, and a dessert table that a group of girls on vacation will photograph before touching. The à la carte spots — Poseidón for seafood, Sumptuori for Japanese — need booking by early afternoon or you're out of luck. Nobody tells you this at check-in. I'm telling you now.

The beach is the thing, though. Playa de Bávaro stretches wide and pale, the sand so fine it squeaks underfoot, and the water is that absurd shade of turquoise that looks filtered in photos but isn't. Lounge chairs fill up by nine in the morning — a territorial dance involving towels and flip-flops that plays out at every all-inclusive on earth — but if you walk five minutes east, past the catamaran launch, the crowd thins. A guy named Julio sells coconuts from a cooler near the tree line. He'll crack one open with a machete and charge you nothing because your wristband already covered it, but tip him anyway.

“The pool has a swim-up bar where strangers become friends by the second piña colada and forget each other's names by dinner.”

The pool complex is enormous and warm as bathwater by afternoon. There's a swim-up bar where the bartender, who introduces himself as Manny, makes a mean passion fruit daiquiri and remembers your name after one visit. The casino exists for people who want to lose money in air conditioning, and the spa offers a couples' massage that a girls' trip will rebrand as a friendship ritual. It's fine. The sauna is better than the massage.

The honest thing: the resort is huge, and walking from your room to the beach in flip-flops takes a solid twelve minutes. After a few drinks, that walk feels longer. The Wi-Fi works in the lobby and near the main pool but gets patchy in the rooms, which is either a problem or a gift depending on your relationship with your phone. Some hallways smell faintly of chlorine. The nightly entertainment — a dance show, a magician, a DJ who plays the same Daddy Yankee set twice — is earnest and loud and exactly what you'd expect. One night we watched a staff member in a sequined vest perform a genuinely impressive fire-eating act while a toddler in the front row ate ice cream, unbothered.

Walking out into the morning

On the last morning, I skip the buffet and walk to the edge of the property where a low wall separates the resort from a dirt path leading to a small neighborhood. A woman is hanging laundry on a line strung between two coconut palms. Bachata plays from a phone propped on a windowsill. A skinny dog trots past with purpose. The air smells like salt and somebody frying plantains. It's seven in the morning and the real Bávaro is already awake, doing what it does whether or not a few hundred tourists in wristbands are sleeping off last night's open bar.

If you want to see anything beyond the resort walls, the guagua — a local minibus — runs along the main road toward Higüey for next to nothing. El Cortecito beach village is a fifteen-minute walk north and has souvenir shops, actual Dominican restaurants, and a bar called Onno's where the rum punch is strong and the sunset view costs nothing.

Rates at the Grand Palladium Palace start around $180 per person per night, all-inclusive — every meal, every drink, every sequined fire-eater. For a girls' trip splitting a room, that math works out to a few days of doing absolutely nothing with people you actually like, which is harder to find than it sounds.