We chose to stay at Qualia for our anniversary mid 2011 and we arrived with high hopes. The check in procedure was fairly straightforward despite the fact that the golf buggy we had allocated to us wasnt working and we needed another one. Arriving in the room we were happy we had paid the extra money for a private plunge pool and the views were amazing. This however was where the positive aspects ended!

Upon closer inspection of the room housekeeping seemed severely lacking with the large amounts of hair around the bathroom and stained bed sheets. We were excited to dine in the long pavilion restaurant on our first night but the service standards were extremely poor. the young waitress we had seemed to have no idea what was going on and we spotted her texting on her phone when she thought she was out of sight twice during the night. We thought we'd lash out with a nice bottle of wine and had the "sommilier" sent over. He ranted on about his reccomendations for a few minutes and had apparently had a few wines himself given his slurred speech and red face. We opted for our own choice of wine and were virtually left alone to enjoy our overpriced meals, only interrutping someone from circling the restauramt aimlessly to ask for our bill. When we recieved it literally nothing on it was accurate and it was explained that the computer system was outdated and they didnt have the right "buttons" for our meals and wine but were assured that the prices were the same?? We decided not to make an issue out of this despite the fact that it is realistically not much to expect a correct bill for your $60 main courses.

Breakfast every morning was a debacle with half hour waits on coffee, food missing off most orders and seemingly very hungover staff, however lunch at Pebble Beach was a much nicer setting with more casual service and for some reason much more experienced staff. The poolside service of drinks and food was particularly nice.

We decided to give the Long Pavilion another try on our last night but were dissapointed in the food and the fact we had to wait ages for our table, the only upside was that Qualia seems to think free glasses of Veuve Cliquot will solve any problem which we were more than happy to accept. The service was much better on this night with a young blond kiwi girl catering to all our needs (we declined the services of the somilier). The only problem was when we decided to have after dinner cocktails, the french bartender was extremely rude and spoke negligable english, producing some extremely poor martinis, very dissapointing after the amazing ones we had from the lovely young Australian lad on our first night.

Housekeeping was another area extremely lacking with very inconsistent services happening at all hours of the morning rather than just when we were at breakfast or something. There was also a very intrusive turndown service around 9pm with 2 housekeepers having a conversation in rapid korean while we were trying to watch a movie. Id probably not even bother going into detail about the room service which was extremely expensive ($55 club sandwiches) and took well over an hour, only to arrive cold each time.

After all this we decided we wanted to speak to higher management before check out to voice our opinions but apparently it was the general managers day off and restaurant manager was nowhere to be found. Overall while Qualia does have the location and facilites to be one of Australasias best resorts they have a long way to go in all service areas.. Maybe a staff pay rise would be a good start?? shouldnt be too hard when your guests are paying over $1500 a night for a room.