Agree the suite and the view was good barring the high temperatures that plagued the entire property but the services we consumed at the hotel were not of the standard I think are reasonable to expect at the prices being levied. The annoying thing was that they could have been good as the quality of the food and drink was high, just that the service was so bad it detracted from the parts that worked.

The root cause of the service issues seemed to me to be too few staff trying to serve too many customers. They didn't want to give bad service they just did because they were too stretched todo anything better. A smile case in point being serving of our bottle of wine in Capricorn. We had to request every top up and ended up with full glasses as we finished our meal, this would have been fine had the wine bucket been closer so that I could self serve but it was located 40 feet from our table. This is a relatively minor point but illustrative.

At breakfast on our first day it wasn't immediately clear which tables were in use so we sat at a table which wasn't being used for some 10 minutes before realising we needed to sit somewhere else when no cutlery or service of any kind was forthcoming. Not once on any of the 3 days did any staff member proactively ask if we wanted any drinks etc. at breakfast in the 10 to 20 minutes it had taken to be seated, get juices, have some cereal etc. On the Sunday it was so hard to find any staff at all that I had to go to the single staff member manning the arrival station to demand a hot drink after 20 plus minutes waiting.

I wonder if timing was a factor, we were at breakfast quite early and service was particularly bad. We tend to eat quite late (dinner reservations around 20:30 each night) and service was particularly bad, perhaps late breakfast early dinner was better?

The repeated nature of our experience in each and every restaurant makes me think we were not unlucky with uniquely slow staff, it was a universal problem. Now if we were in the med where it mightn't be too uncommon to take 3 plus hours to execute a meal service and we were relaxed about that, it might be fine, but in Northern Europe it really isn't. It would have been far worse had I been trying to conduct business rather than relaxing.

I think the overall context sets the scene for everything else, in overall context even my massively laid back wife was unhappy about service standards and it needs to be pretty bad before she starts to moan. That ruined the experience for us. I so wanted to like this property. If you feel your overall xoerience is good it tends to smooth the rough edges, when you think it is bad it tends to sharpen them.