WARNING – Do not book this hotel if you’re expecting five star service!! Unless you pay the extra for butler service this Sandals resort just doesn’t care about its guests. We booked for 6 nights for our honeymoon and were disappointed on a daily basis. They offer a daily resort guide advising where you can eat and drink but throughout the day will change their minds – leaving you wondering why you bothered picking up the guide. We ordered breakfast in our room on 3 consecutive days before it actually turned up and when it did turn up it was wrong. We found ourselves with a romantic breakfast eating cereal out of a glass.
When you complain the concierge staff are pleasant but don’t offer any solutions – they apologise for the mistakes and problems but never rectify them. During a torrential storm it took them 2 hours to find an umbrella for us (everyone else already had them!) our whole evening was ruined, as we were too late for our dinner reservation.
The private offshore island wasn’t available for half of the time we were there – although there was no advance warning. A photoshoot closed it on a special day for us (my birthday) but even on the actual day when we phoned for times of the boat across to the island no one informed us it was closed – even the resort guide said it was open. After standing and waiting for the boat for more than half an hour someone came over and told us the island was closed all day. We later found out from some other guests that it opened in the afternoon – the communication between staff and guests was atrocious!!
We spent half of the first day without towels for the pool or beach. We were told there was a problem with the laundry machine but no one offered a solution for us – we couldn’t go swimming for quite a few hours on our very first day and were told to simply wait until the machine was working again.
I’ve highlighted just a few of the daily problems we faced and would definitely have booked somewhere else if I’d known Sandals shows so little regards for its guests and their reputation.
I did send the manager a complaint letter once I’d returned from my disappointing honeymoon and was offered 3 nights free accommodation. This is useless to anyone based as far away as the UK as flights would cost a fortune so you would have to increase you stay to at least 6 nights to make it worth while -thus spending a lot more money to experience the service we should have received in the first place. The Manager didn’t care and simply stated he felt this was a fair offer.
We will NEVER return to the Bahamas after experiencing a horrible stay at the RIU. Not only were rooms horrible. We were to be given Deluxe Rooms, however, they gave us rooms overlooking the air conditioning units and the noise was horrible and loud. When asking for water, soda, assistance with our luggage, we we told "shortly". We waited and eventually had to retrieve our own drinks and my husband being on a cane due to hip surgery, had to take our large pieces of luggage to and from our rooms without any help. To go to the restaurants, either steak or Japan food, one had to wait on a line over 1/2 an hour. We travel often, and this hotel was the worst experience we have ever had.