Originally Posted by proteome

What a beautiful resort!

Stayed here during the Christmas period and loved the resort and facilities.

They really like to bang on that they are 'WORLD'S LEADING LUXURY RESORT', but really aside from the resort itself there are too many service fails for it to be even a leading Asian Intercontinental Hotel.

Some of the let downs of the hotel:

- In-room dining couldn't understand us most of the time, nor could we understand them. We were served a chocolate cake from the kids menu with cream that had turned bad. Just getting it replaced with 'no cream' was tiresome and strangely the complaint was never handed down the line to a manager for follow-up. It was amusing to hear 'we are sorry that the cake is not up to your standards'. I would hope that cake that is going to poison guests, especially from the kids menu would not be up to the hotel's standards either. Every other time interacting with in-room-dining was extremely tiresome - forget about trying to make modifications or clarifications (yes, it's sad to have in-room dining so often at such a beautiful hotel, but I was sick for a few days)

- Club lounge and club pool have a children banned at all times policy. Seems a little odd in Asia (to me) now that even ICHK allow kids during evening cocktails and canapes. Only real gripe with this is that you cannot enjoy complimentary beverages in other areas of the hotel. Kids are banned from all club areas. Would be great if the Club Card could entitle club members to complimentary water/soda at non-club areas of the hotel (obviously not restaurants).

- During XMAS lunch we had a ~$350USD per head buffet lunch with wine. Was a really great spread and a good afternoon. There was a clown making kids swords from balloons upon entry. Unfortunately, an hour into lunch our eldest knocked a glass of wine with the hotel provided sword and smashed it. We had our table cleared, wine glasses removed and replaced with glasses of water as well as our place settings taken.

A bit of a non-verbal 'its time for you to leave now' was the message received...so we did

- They do not give upgrades (At least in our case) according the the terms and conditions of the program. RA are entitled to club access as a separate guaranteed benefit - hotel believes giving a room with club access counts as a tier upgrade. We were at least given the room we had expected to receive on the final 2 nights of our stay (it was incredible).

- Golf buggies are one of the forms of transport you are to rely on to get around parts of the resort. But they are a lucky dip that they may ever arrive after you call for them. We had a hit rate of about 2 of every 3 booked would arrive. We would just start walking when they hadn't arrived after 20 minutes or so.

- The rooms all have wine fridges with a great selection of wines. However, ordering an ICE BUCKET was only successful on 1 our of 4 attempts, even with follow up phone calls

- While the TV has a good selection of English channels, the satellite feed cuts out the sound a few times per minute (for a quick second) but then for multiple seconds every few minutes. It's REALLY annoying. (The problem persisted when we changed to a different room on a different area of the resort all together - so it would appear to be the actual satellite feed rather than an individual wiring or tv/set top box problem)

- Club lounge lounges were filthy and the food very low quality most days. However, the final day the food was incredibly fresh and tasty. Don't know what caused this inconsistency

I normally wouldn't feel the need to be such a nit-picker at these things, but it just irks me that all around the resort, on the website, emails and printed materials about the resort have them make the claim of WORLD'S LEADING LUXURY RESORT. No way.