This was a family trip / birthday celebration with a couple of friends from Canada. Since I'm meticulous about how I choose a resort, reviewed this one carefully online and chose this for the price and the layout of the hotel. The layout is super-important to me because if laid out correctly, the resort is more conducive to social gatherings and meeting people.
Room: Nice, spacious, clean. Bed was comfortable and actually while we were there they were replacing all of the mattresses in all of the rooms. They are pillow-top mattresses btw. The TV has almost 100 channels! Having stated all of that, the rooms could use some refreshing and are starting to look a bit tired, but not overly-so. I would still stay here as it still gives the rooms a nice Caribbean feel.
Food: The buffet is huge with beautiful views and is quite spacious. For me the food here was quite bland and repetitive. The A La Carte restaurants on the other hand were awesome. I highly recommend trying the Dominican one as the food there was my favorite.
After 10pm though, the food is not good. There is only one place open, which is the snack bar outside near the beach. While the atmosphere is nice, the food in my opinion is gross. It looks quite aged and unsanitary, and sure doesn't taste good. They really need to fix food quality and availability after 10pm.
Activities: PLENTY. From rock-climbing to trapeze lessons, and even non-motorized water sports which includes a catamaran, windsailing, boogie boards and snorkels.
Night Life: There is a huge theater that usually has some sort of show, but most of the action takes place at one of the lobby bars which are located on either end of the property. There is live music and there's also a super-loud disco underneath the hotel. The people were fairly social and it was easy to talk with people. Because it was the playoffs, me and my friends spent a lot of time at the sports bar in the night located on the hotel property where we met a bunch of new people. While the sports bar looks fairly drab, it's actually fairly lively in the night and worth checking out if you want to meet some other guests.
Casino: Stay the HELL away from this place. Let me state upfront, and this is according to the hotel itself: The Casino is NOT part of the hotel and has nothing to do with the hotel. Even though the hotel actively promotes the casino, is openly connected to it (meaning you can walk from inside the hotel to inside the casino directly), and they have casino staff handing out wrist-bands to come play for free at the casino, it is NOT part of the hotel. Make sense?
Ultimately my friend didn't leave the hotel for the rest of the vacation because he was afraid someone would kidnap him, but fortunately he never paid them all of that money the casino tried to rip him off of. Score one of the good-guys.
All in all, I was happy with this property. The biggest improvements in my opinion are the food as well as the availability of decent food options late at night. It would be AWESOME if there were even little snacky things like chips and peanuts. I would also recommend the hotel offer some better quality alcohol as most of what I drank was from labels I didn't recognize (ie. the cheap stuff), and definitely did not have the same kick.
Other than that, the hotel staff was kind, took care of us, and we had a great time! The beach on which this hotel is situated is awesome and the weather was fantastic for us. If you have kids this is a great place and if you don't, this is still a great place. You may be wondering why I only gave it three stars instead of four: we asked for towels multiple times (about 6 times) and they never brought us the wash-cloths we requested, the lack of food in the night was an issue, and the rooms could use a bit of updating. If you have a few more bucks to spend, then I would stay somewhere with better food.
Comments
Post a Comment