A great break away after being ‘grounded’ in Sydney for 12+ months thanks to Covid. A great (but somewhat dated) property, we had a lovely time regardless. Our only qualm is.....children. The ‘Terrace Pool’ NEEDS to be adults only. We’ve come here for peace & quiet & had to deal with noisy children jumping in, screaming etc with oblivious parents nowhere to be seen. The lagoon beach pool is massive and is where children need to be leaving the ‘Terrace Pool’ for adults wanting quiet time. Would we return...yes but the pool issue is imperative that it’s fixed.
We went Mid Week after seeing a good price & after school had returned for the year.. We enjoyed our 4 days over looking the pool on the ground floor. The rooms was very large and spacious, almost a walk in wardrobe & lovely large bathroom. The room was serviced each day much to our surprise. Lovely clean grounds, pool. Enjoyed very much
We are in love with this resort. Rooms were perfect,staff were unreal in a good way, breakfast was sublime and the pools are probably the best on the gold coast. Even though it poured rain there were free umbrellas at every building and staff would drive a buggy to shuttle you anywhere in a heartbeat, even too the marina We Will Be Back, actually we already have been back for their high coffee/tea experience since our stay
The resort was beautiful. The room was clean and quite and the bed was really comfortable. The staff were friendly and helpful. The only disapointment was the breakfast. Due to covid no buffet was available so we chose off the menu. The meal was terrible. My waffles were hard as a rock and my husbands meal was equally as bad, very very disappinting for such a resort. We ate out after that.
I recently stayed at the property for three nights in a Garden View Room with a family member, taking a trip that was meant to be a birthday celebration that unfortunately had to be moved due to the recent Brisbane lockdown. I am not quite sure how to describe the experience, having had such a mix of positive and negative aspects. This review will be quite lengthy but I encourage potential guests to read until the end, as I hope it will inform others as to whether they wish to stay there. I'm fairly sure I won't stay in the future. We had not travelled to the resort before, but based on the website I had expectations that it would live up to 5-star standards. At the beginning, it certainly did. We arrived two hours early but our room was ready, we were checked in quickly and made our way to the Rapsis block of the resort. The room was clean and the amenities good, and all seemed well. Not long after settling in we realised that we'd been placed three rooms up from a large group of about six adults and a young child staying in the block's Queenslander Suite. The reason this was a problem is because the hotel rooms are extremely close together in each block, with all the outdoor areas of each room on ground floor having a see-through lattice wall in between them rather than a wall or any seclusion. Essentially this means you can see, hear and smell everything coming from adjacent rooms from the glass doors in your room - privacy and quiet is minimal. This group was possibly the loudest, most disrespectful group we have ever had the misfortune of sharing a hotel with. Sitting outside on their small balcony on ground floor with a carton of bourbon cans, they proceeded to drink and smoke themselves into oblivion from early in the afternoon until well into the night, constantly going back and forth on the grass directly near everyone's rooms (carting more and more alcohol back to their room with them) and becoming increasingly rowdy (yelling, hooting etc.) while everyone around them was trying to sleep. I was kept awake for some time, but eventually the noise died down and I finally fell asleep. The second day was more of the same, only worse. When we returned to our room about 3:00pm after a day out, we found the males of the group sitting on the grass right outside everyone's rooms smoking and drinking again. Two young men carried two more cartons of beer into the room with them, along with bottles of spirits, while the women of the group made repeated trips back to their room from the pool bar carrying jugs of cocktails. I was astonished the resort permitted them to bring what must have been at least 100 cans of beer onto the property with them, not to mention the other bottles in the room. The older woman of the group was so intoxicated on one of these trips back from the pool bar she walked up and began trying to pull open the glass door to our room, obviously too drunk to realise she was trying to get into someone else's room. She kept on trying to pull the (locked) door open until I approached the glass and yelled at her to go away. She then went to the room next to us and tried the same thing - only that room wasn't hers either. By this time I was thoroughly fed up, and called the Duty Manager to advise of the situation. It was this call to the Duty Manager that we learned the group were at the resort to attend a wedding that weekend, and that someone had been sent down to their room to investigate due to the large quantities of alcohol involved. Since they were at the wedding reception, we knew we were probably in for a second night of complete disturbance when they returned. The Duty Manager recognised our concerns about their behaviour, apologised and offered to move us to another room in another block (the Royal Palm), which we gratefully accepted. At 7:00pm on the second night we packed up our room and were taken by a member of staff to our new room in the new block, which was - to our relief - much quieter. The Duty Manager followed up with a call to ensure we were happy and settled in the new room, which was appreciated. My strong recommendation to the hotel is that if large numbers of wedding guests are in attendance, put them all together in the same block and put other guests away from them in other blocks. This will minimise the chance that the enjoyment of other guests won't be compromised like ours was. Guests don't pay hundreds of dollars to have their stay ruined by people who treat the resort like their own personal pub and nightclub until the early hours of the morning. It was a very poor reflection on the resort's reputation that they allowed this type of behaviour to occur. I had hoped for no further issues during our stay. On the third day, however, we saw a golf buggy parked out front of the Royal Palm block. As I was staying with someone with a severe mobility issue and who struggles to walk, we enquired as to whether the buggy was to transport guests around the hotel. The staff member advised that the buggy was indeed there to transport guests around the resort and the marine village, and all guests had to do was call 9 on their room phones to arrange a pickup. No one had told us about this service at check-in, or in the check-in documents, and my poor travelling companion had limped around the resort and to the marine village - in pain - thinking they had no other way of getting around. To make matters worse, when we had enquired about whether such a pickup was available at the resort, we were initially told that the buggies were all privately owned and none were available to guests! This, in my view, was absolutely terrible - all guests should be informed at check-in that the resort offers a pickup and drop-off buggy service and how to access it. This is especially the case where any elderly or mobility-impaired guests are staying - this should be a top priority for the resort to increase the amenity for these guests. Communication at the resort is highly hit and miss - once we knew about the pickup and drop off service by buggy, we were first told it was available between 6:00am and 9:30pm, then another staff member told us it was 24 hours. Three different versions from three different staff. In any event, I recommend the hotel makes it a requirement for all staff to advise guests at check-in and mention the service on the check-in hard copy papers, not to mention put it on the website. This would save guests who need help getting around a whole lot of trouble. All of the above was probably more than we bargained for but it wasn't over yet. On our final night on Sunday we decided to have dinner at Verandah Restaurant because it doesn't require bookings. The male waiter (whose name begins with J) was the rudest, most abrupt person I have ever come across and treated us like we were second class citizens from the moment we arrived - we were so taken aback by his attitude we cancelled our dinner orders and left. Don't bother! A few other things I noted that weren't up to standard: - I found a cockroach in the room in Royal Palm (I have photos); - The resort had rubbish strewn everywhere after Saturday night. On a walk through the resort on Sunday morning there were wet towels in corridors, empty alcohol and water bottles thrown in the gardens and empty cocktail glasses and water cups from the pool bar strewn about on the sand and the ground - I think the staff try and clean most of this up but it wasn't a good look; - The lagoon pool really needs a clean - full of dead bugs; and - We weren't told there's a shuttle service to the Country Club, or that you can get beach towels from concierge (I completely agree with a previous reviewer that communication is basically non-existent at the resort). Now for the things that weren't disappointing - The service staff here - with the exception of the waiter I mentioned above - are absolutely faultless and second to none in their level of service. Every single member of staff at Cove Cafe and The Fireplace made us feel valued and welcome. I especially appreciated the staff at breakfast in Cove Cafe, who always had a smile and efficient service to offer. I don't know the name of the older lady with blonde hair on food service at Cove Cafe, but she is an absolute credit to the resort. The housekeeping staff were also just lovely and so accommodating. I thank them all for their kindness to us. The breakfast at Cove Cafe is very well done. We enjoyed our breakfast every day, with the food being fresh and delicious. The High Coffee was a lovely experience (although slightly too much sweet food), and having the little takeaway box was a really nice touch. The kangaroos grazing and hopping about are a lovely addition to the resort. My verdict? On the whole, given how many ups and downs this trip had, I can only describe the stay as a little bit bizarre. Given how great the vast majority of the staff were I don't want to write the resort off altogether (and since rowdy, drunken guests are in part outside the resort's control), but the total lack of communication with guests about important aspects of the resort and the appalling experience at Verandah makes it unlikely I will return. Given the resort markets itself as five-star accommodation, there is a lot of room for improvement before it earns that title - my expectations in that regard were not met and neither were those of my travelling companion. The little things that make a stay go from good to great were not well executed. There are things I know now that if I'd been told on the first day at check-in would have made our stay so much easier and more enjoyable. Sadly that didn't happen and so I left with a pretty mixed bag of memories from our stay, not all of them pleasant. Disappointing stay overall.…
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