No way a five star hotel! 3½ more likely. Beautiful physical hotel. Very lacking service!
Good
Very comfortable beds. The best I’ve slept on in years. I think they are that memory foam type.
Architecturally, the rooms are stunning. The design details are many. In my bathroom, there were six light switches.
The pool is big and beautiful.
Everything is new.
The boats for the Underground River are only a few minutes away.
There is stable electricity 24/7 here (diesel generators). The entire town only gets four hours of electricity a day.
Skip eating dinner here, and instead head to Doluyon Beach Resort (five minute easy walk away). It has better food and selection, more personality, and much, much better service.
Bad
Major issue - the service is 3rd rate in this hotel (it’s not even 2nd rate). It’s supposed to be a five star establishment. Yes, they currently have a “soft” opening. But the service is woefully inadequate. They mean well, but the execution is awful. Given that they are tapping into the local (inexperienced) labor market, it’s not going to change for quite a while.
Major issue - The wifi is free, and there’s a saying “You get what you pay for.” The satellite signal and/or network goes out frequently. And there isn’t a lot of bandwidth. Forget about doing Skype most of the time.
Major issue - they clean rooms up to 11P – midnight! One night when my room wasn’t cleaned by 10:30P, I marched to the front desk, expressed my unhappiness, and told them to skip by room because I wanted to sleep.
The restaurant food is mediocre. The pizza I had for dinner was probably the worst I’ve ever had in the world. That’s saying a lot because I’ve had lots of pizza throughout 90 some odd countries. For instance, their cheese (which is typically mozzarella) is cream-cheese – yuck. Even the free breakfast was just blah. Top bad service on top of this and it’s a sad experience.
It’s an awful long drive from the airport to the hotel – two hours! Mostly paved roads thankfully.
Their website says they answer e-mails / special requests within 24 hours. What a joke. Two days later and I was still waiting for a response.
The hotel offer free airport pickup, but you better confirm it – especially for last minute bookings. Their website doesn’t list the benefit, and the staff here don’t read their e-mails, so I had to keep calling them to confirm the pickup.
The A/C blows on the bed. And I mean right on the bed. Adjusting the slants via the remote didn’t do much. I did find out you can manually adjust the slats in ways you can’t with the remote.
The small refig in the room doesn’t work that well. When you leave the room, all the electric to the room shuts off including the refig. Good luck on every getting cold beer or soda.
There is a major problem with ants everywhere. Don’t even think of putting any food in your room, even in sealed bags. The ants even infested the keyboard of my laptop (there apparently were food crumbs there) The ants get in via holes in the wall.
