I was upgraded on a two night award stay from a regular room to an oceanview - though not a suite. A bit odd to me that I didn't get a suite, because it seemed like the resort was empty, but I was fine with it and certainly wasn't going to say anything.

Wifi had pretty good access across the property - I could even connect by the pool, which was nice, since my phone wasn't picking up ANY signal on that side of the island. The usual method of registering with name and room number wasn't working; I had to call down to the service desk and they gave me a key code to put in. Not a problem at all, but wanted to mention it so other people know what to do instead of waiting a few hours for the "temporary problem" to be fixed, as the error message suggests.

In the book on the desk, they advertise the "Westin Unwind" ritual, but when I went down to the lobby, didn't see any kind of free drinks or food, except for the usual container of fruit punch that sits by the front desk all day.

Agreed that the hotel is totally isolated. I rented a car, but only used it to go to Oyster Bay a bit. I used Hertz for $25/day at the airport - for two days + tax, worked out to be only a bit more than taking taxis. However, worth noting that the roads in St. Maarten are AWFUL - totally torn up, extremely narrow, you take a lot of REALLY steep hills, and not well-marked at all. I usually consider myself an excellent driver/navigator, and I was a bit scared. The directions provided on the website are kind of correct, but I would suggest taking a good look at a map of St. Maarten to understand where you're going from and to - when they tell you to go left at the pond, I think you're actually better off going right. I went left and there were no signs for Dawn Beach until much further along (and a few turns later). Luckily, I have an excellent sense of direction so I had a decent idea of which way to turn, and eventually I started seeing signs for Dawn Beach again. However, if you do go left at the pond instead of right, there's no final sign telling you to turn right for the Westin; I ended up on the French side seeing signs that said the Westin was back the way I came, until I figured out which turn to make. If you're good with directions/a map, I'd say you're fine; if not, HIGHLY recommend a GPS or a driver.

The staff was VERY friendly and helpful, which I appreciated... but a lot of the male staff were hitting on me repeatedly, which was annoying. I'd expect more from Westin staff. That said, it seemed to happen a lot of places across the island (restaurants, etc), so I thought maybe it wasn't considered as rude/unacceptable in St. Maarten or something?

Had absolutely no problem getting chairs at the pool, but again, the resort didn't seem to have too many people in general.

For anyone looking for internet, I'll note that the power (as in, electrical power) went out for a few hours on the second day of my stay. It was a beautiful sunny day (not stormy), and the kitchen staff acted like this happened all the time... not a good sign. Most of the guest room hallways don't have any natural light, and there was no one to help me navigate, so I was trying to use the glow of my cell phone to light the way and get to my room safely. When the power came back on a few hours later, I went down to the front desk to ask if they could provide any vouchers for food, since I was now going to have to work through my dinner reservation (not having Wifi all afternoon). They seemed surprised that the power outage was a problem for me, but did agree to comp room service for me, which was nice. On my way back to the room, I was waiting for the elevator and the power went out again - this time, luckily for only about 10 minutes. I was just glad I hadn't been one step further and ON the elevator when that happened!

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet in this thread is the gym, which is a big factor for me. It's a small-ish room with three treadmills, one bike, and one elliptical, as well as a full set of dumbbells and one of the old-school "universal" machines (the kind that aren't adjustable pulley cables or actually "universal," but just have a different machine set up on each of the four sides). I was fine with just the cardio and the free weights.

Downside when I returned: I got an email from the property thanking me for my stay, telling me that I'd be getting a survey soon, and noting that it's their goal to get a score of perfect 10 from all guests (um, thanks for the tip). However, what bothered me more than the tackiness of that request is that it was sent to about 15 people (presumably guests who checked out in the last few days), all of whom showed up in the "to" line of the email with their name and email address (i.e., not BCCed). It's no secret to any of my friends/family/coworkers/etc that I was there, but it makes me a bit uncomfortable that all the guests have all the other guests' names and email addresses. Unless I'm supposed to write back to everyone like I'm a 10 year old at summer camp and stay penpals forever?

Happy to answer any additional questions about the property to help with your decisionmaking; however, this was my first SPG resort stay so I don't have a lot to compare it to. I'm sure that will change after the Q2 promo though