This is a modern peaceful resort, far from the airport, town, and other hotels. Perfect if you want to forgot everything and relax. The rooms were excellent with typically comfy Renaissance beds, baths, and private balcony.
The swimming pools are enormous, and kept the kids busy from dawn 'til dusk. The hotel is on a quiet sandy beach, with plenty of beds and umbrellas and nice views of the sea, coastline and forest. The beach also offers excellent space for walking and jogging for several uninhabited kilometers south of the resort along the sand (where we found a huge dead PIG during a romantic sunset stroll).
The staff were generally very helpful, though they need to keep working on their English. The electric curtains got stuck closed in one room on the first day, it took 4 calls / visits to reception and 24 hours for this to be repaired!
The food was good, a wide selection is available without leaving the resort.

New modern resort that is impressive by its size, quite far from the airport, around 1h by taxi.
the room was gigantic with a nice South of France feeling. The beach is very big so even though there are many loud chinese/russian groups, you can still find your little place of calm.
We were staying in the day beds next to the sand, and were having lunch there every day, it was really relaxing.

The swimming pool is endless, worth to use it too.
The sea food restaurant was very good, a bit pricey, try to choose an isolated table for more intimacy.
The breakfast buffet is very rich, nice fresh cucumber and orange juices in the morning, asian and western food, basically everything you need.

Overall a good experience, the facilities and the view is very good, it is definitely a 5 star hotel and will stay there again if we go back to Sanya.

I couldn't fault this resort; the service, facilities, staff and the resort itself is amazing. The onsite restaurants are 1st class and the Spa is simply one of the best I have ever been to. Their attention to detail has left nothing to chance. I will defintley visit again next time I am passing through Asia.

This is an excellent resort for a nice family vacation. We stayed here for a week with our 7 year old kid and all of us enjoyed thoroughly. In fact, we ventured out only once for local sightseeing and spent rest of the days in resort itself!

Pros:

Excellent property:
– Resort is new, opened in March 2011. So almost everything is in perfect condition.
– Fabulous rooms, more spacious than other resorts, bathroom is big. Every room has a large balcony (mostly overlooking beach/pool from higher floors and garden from lower floors) with nice seating arrangement.
– Enormous pool (4 large inter-connected pools) with nice pool lighting in the night. Kids pool with slide.
– Nice Spa with good service.
– Beach is virtually private and clean where one can relax with ease (nice family Kabanas at the Beach). Very attentive beach staff and facilities (including kids beach set). Long 3 km beach line where one can take a very quite walk.
– Excellent buffet breakfast (available till 11 pm!) with large Continental and Chinese selection. Three restaurants (continental, chinese, seafood).

Very good for kids:
– This is an amazing resort for kids – we selected it over Sheraton (despite being SPG member) because of its numerous kid’s facilities.
– My son enjoyed a lot at R-Cade (bowling - one kid’s line with side bumps, Xbox, Wii, Kid’s games, TT, Pool etc.), R-Kids (nice kid’s activities throughout the day with some free, toy room, movie room, kid’s food menu, nap room etc.), free movie theater (3 free movies a day including some good kids movies), kids pool with slides, 3 hot water open Jacuzzi, very family looking beach where our son enjoyed a lot!

Amazing service:
– The best part about Renaissance Sanya is its very warm and friendly service. Very nicely managed by Sean (the Resident Manager) – he was wonderful and would have interacted with us atleast 3 times during our stay (very hands-on manager - seemed to be present everywhere in the resort).
– We are vegetarian and Becker (main restaurant manager) and his team (Gloria etc.) took great care of us by preparing custom made vegetarian dishes during lunch / dinner. Even the Chinese Restaurant arranged Vegetarian food for us! (Special thanks to Sudip Menon, sea food restaurant manager, for understanding and conveying our needs to other restaurants).
– Room service is very quick. Staff at the beach is also very friendly and efficient. Staff at R-Cade and R-Kids are excellent.
– I saw a few reactions about poor English skills of the staff – I somewhat disagree with those comments – in my view it is more to do with the difference in their English accent than the English skills.

Cons:

Location: The resort is about 45-60 minutes away from main Sanya city and Airport. There is nothing around the resort. Though resort provides 3x day shuttle bus service to Sanya, you will still feel mentally blocked to venture out. Hence, location may be the foremost consideration while selecting this resort. We purposely wanted a quite secluded location to get away, hence chose Renaissance over others (apart from being a kids friendly resort).

Transportation: The free airport shuttle departs from Airport as per fixed time schedule – we missed it by 15 minutes and the taxi driver outside managed to grab RMB225 from us! On return, we requested the Resort travel desk (they call it Navigator) a day in advance to arrange a private AC car (RMB200 and much better than non-AC old taxis). But at the last moment, the private car driver refused to go to Airport and the Resort travel desk offered us to take a non-AC taxi which just came to drop off some other guests - though the taxi driver turned out to be a nice person but still not a good experience at end of otherwise an excellent trip (I had to unfortunately raise my voice before the travel desk but was helpless as we could have missed our flight).

In all, I would highly recommend Renaissance Sanya for families with small kids and even couples who would just like to get away from the hustle and bustle of a big city life and spend a quality time in a peaceful, nice and caring environment.