A marketing page is written to make you book. A fact sheet is written for travel agents and event planners, and it is a completely different kind of document: a dated, structured table of what a property actually contains. Some operators publish one per resort, free, on their own website. Palladium does, as a PDF it calls a ficha tecnica. Playa Hotels and Resorts does the same. Others publish a meetings-and-events version that serves an equivalent purpose for anyone willing to read it as a consumer document instead. Across the resorts we track, a fact sheet is the single richest piece of evidence we have found anywhere on an operator’s own site.
What a fact sheet contains that the marketing page does not
From the ones we have read directly, a handful of fields turn up again and again, and none of them appear on a standard booking page. An exact room count, broken down by category, with the number of rooms in each and their floor area in square metres, so you can see that a resort has, say, 537 rooms of which 40 include a private pool. Airport distance and drive time as two separate figures rather than one vague estimate. Beach sand colour, and whether the beach carries a lifeguard. Accessible room counts, level access and pool access, stated as specific numbers rather than a general claim of accessibility. Build year and last refurbishment year, which is the one figure nobody else publishes and tells you more about the real condition of a room than any photograph on the booking site. Restaurant opening hours, whether a reservation is required, and whether a dress code applies. And its own publication date, so you can judge how current the rest of the information actually is.
How to find one
Search the operator’s own domain for the property name plus “fact sheet” or “ficha tecnica,” adding “PDF” if the first search does not turn anything up. Many fact sheets sit at a predictable URL pattern, so once you find one for a property, the same pattern frequently works for its sister resorts in the same portfolio. If nothing comes up under that search, try “meetings,” “events” or “MICE” plus the property name; the events-industry version of the document is often published even when the general consumer one is not.
How to read one carefully
Two traps come up often enough to flag directly. The first is confusing a hotel’s own figures with the wider complex’s figures. This is common where two or more hotels share a single resort site: both properties frequently print the same pool, bar and restaurant totals on their individual fact sheets, because the numbers describe the shared village rather than either hotel specifically. We have seen one pair of resorts publish identical 21-bar and 5-pool figures on both sheets while publishing genuinely different room counts, meaning the room counts were real and specific while the rest described the complex as a whole. If a number looks identical across two properties that clearly differ in size, treat it as a complex total rather than a hotel-specific one.
The second trap is assuming a room-category breakdown always adds up to the stated total. We read one fact sheet where a single category listed 252 of a claimed 253 rooms, with no accounting for the missing room elsewhere in the document. In a case like that, record the overall total and treat the category breakdown as directional rather than exact.
Always check the publication date before relying on anything else in the document. A sheet dated 2025 describes the resort as it existed in 2025, and refurbishments or closures since then will not appear.
What even a fact sheet will not tell you
A fact sheet is a specification, not a review, and it has clear limits. Mandatory resort fees and add-on charges are rarely included. Kids club age bands are inconsistently covered. Minimum ages at adults-only properties are frequently absent, a gap we cover in more depth in our guide on what resort operators do not publish. What the food actually tastes like is, unsurprisingly, never addressed by a structured PDF.
Still, a fact sheet beats a marketing page on nearly every axis that matters for comparing two shortlisted resorts on paper, particularly room size and age, which our guide on resort room categories covers in more detail, and the kind of published disability access data we walk through in our resort accessibility guide. It is a specification rather than an opinion, and for anyone trying to compare two similar-looking resorts, a specification is exactly what is missing from most of the research most travellers do before they book. If you are also weighing guest sentiment against these hard numbers, our piece on reading a resort’s star rating and guest reviews is the natural next step once the fact sheet itself has been found and read.