We’re Bill & Alison Mencarow, owners of Casa Phoenix Cozumel. We live in Kerrville, Texas with our Standard Poodle, Anna, and a menagerie of stray cats that we care for. Kerrville is in the heart of Texas wine country, just north of San Antonio (and we DO take advantage of that!)
We discovered Cozumel on our honeymoon. It was a sleepy, dusty town. A lot has changed since then. We started spending a lot of time in Cozumel when we learned to scuba dive in 1989 and visited several times a year. We liked to be within walking distance of everything, but there weren’t a lot of nice hotel choices. All the nice ones were far from town and required you to have a rental car, spend a small fortune on taxis, or eat at the same place every night.
In 2001, we already had our August Cozumel vacation scheduled. Then on July 26, 2001 our home burned to the ground. Fortunately we were out of town, and none of our pets were injured. But we lost everything. On that trip to Cozumel we saw things in a different light. In town we noticed a sign about a new building, an investment opportunity, downtown, on the ocean. As real estate investors and lovers of Cozumel, we were intrigued. We did our due diligence and bought a 7th floor oceanfront condo before ground was broken. We named it Casa Phoenix, for the Greek mythology character Phoenix rising from the ashes.
(This is Alison speaking): to this day, I still say when I walk in the front door — just WOW. I cannot believe this beautiful place!