Here is what I wrote a couple of years ago.......

Westin Fiji
Here was the big let-down. I stayed at this property as a youngster a quarter of a century ago when it was the Regent of Fiji - a stablemate of the Regent Beverly Wilshire of "Pretty Woman" fame. It's next to the villas, but with far more oceanfrontage. The buildings have recently been facelifted with new interiors using the luxury Sydney / Melbourne Westin interiors, but the renovations have clearly been bungled in amazing fashion.

The afore-mentioned Australian Westins have bathrooms in which the entire width of the bathroom is separated into two glass-walled, glass-doored cublicles: a toilet and a shower. This has been transplanted into the Fiji property, but whereas the shower floor in Sydney / Melbourne / Auckland is designed to be slightly lower than the bathroom floor and has a steep drop into a drain, in Fiji they use the existing tiled floor with no plug-hole, just an ineffective grate at the back. The outcome for us and everyone we spoke to was that as soon as you start the shower you flood your bathroom.

The thoughtlessness pervades everywhere. The pool area is quite nice but is not tiled or concrete but rather is grassy. The result is that by 10 am it becomes a mudbath, with everyone soiling the pool with their muddy feet. You actually have to walk across the grass to get to and from the pool shower, so if you want to use the pool after being at the beach you go to the shower to wash the sand off your feet, only to collect mud on your way from the shower to the pool. It's just nuts!

When our bathroom flooded (and the cold bath tap didn't work, so there was no alternative to the shower) I tried to get a new room, even a downgrade. There was an Englishman complaining loudly to equally little effect, and I was told that there were no alternative rooms available with a working bathroom and that I'd just have to wait until they fixed the bathtap the next morning (which they did).

VERDICT: The Westin has had an ambitious refurbishment which has been utterly bungled. It still has a superb lobby and good restauarants, but the rooms have been refurbished with good materials in a poorly designed way, and for the same money you could go to the massively superior Le Meridien Isle of Pines.

Starwood's three Fiji properties thrive on a diet of short-haul Australian tourists. If I were American I have no doubt that I would instead head for the Starwood properties on Bora Bora or New Caledonia's Isle of Pines. You wouldn't want to spend too much time or money visiting the Fiji properties.