chinmoylad

Bear in mind I'm being hosted (and they eventually ended up waiving any incidental charges too)...

In short:
- No welcome drink upon arrival (there were fresh towels though). There were 3-4 couples arriving around the same time as us, but everyone had welcome drinks apart from us.
- Was doing the resort tour + meetings on the first day in the afternoon/evening. Staff inquired about where my partner was (as she didn't join me for the tour) where I told four separate persons on four separate occasions that she was currently sleeping in the villa as she's tired. Apparently housekeeping didn't get the memo and went to the villa at their own convenient time, which happened to be when she'd woken up and was mid-shower. She came out dripping wet, wearing a towel. Housekeeping, instead of declining and saying they'll come back (or you know, do it when we're having dinner out or just out and about?), decided now was a good time to clean the room and asked her (again, standing there dripping wet, in a towel) if it's okay to do it now. She was too polite to say "no, come back later". So I got back to the villa where housekeeping are working on the room while she's sitting outside by the sun loungers in a towel, still dripping wet. Weird.
- Asked to replace my beach slippers with a larger size as the ones they gave me did not fit. After some confusion (they brought me the wrong type of slippers the first time around), I was brought a pair of 'beach slippers' that looked extremely cheap and nothing like the ones in the room, and they also 'LOOKED' used (not sure if they were, but the soles had dirt-like marks on them. I showed them the ones I was asking about, only to be told they do not have a larger size than the one I was provided (I was given approximately a US 8. I'm a US 10...).
- Asked for a bucket of ice (we didn't see the bucket in the mini-bar earlier) for in-room dinner. Was provided with an ESKY that had moldy edges near the hinges.

Spoke to management at this point the next day regarding my concerns - service definitely improved from here and things were good for a while (but for a 60-key resort, I'd still expect better really) until things went downhill the night before check-out, but not necessarily service related:

- The coconut shavings, nuts and dried fruits in the mini-bar area are not complimentary. Which isn't a big deal except for the fact that they 'look' like they are (Four Seasons labeling). Further to that, the price list for the mini-bar is very hidden. When I found out I tried to search for the list but couldn't find it - had to call up reception to ask where the price list for the mini-bar is, and it's hidden in a separate drawer from pretty much all the snacks, sitting underneath the bottle openers (and even if you open up the door the full way, you still can't read that it says 'Mini-bar Price List' or equivalent because the writing is not visible even when the door is entirely opened. It almost looks like it's a resting pad for the bottle openers.
- Thought it'd be time for a relaxing bath on the last night, but it was already late (post World Cup game, around 2:00am) - we hadn't tried the bathtub until now. Turned on the taps, which started spewing out orange water. Panicking, we checked the sinks and shower too to see if we'd been washing ourselves/faces in this horrible water. Other water was fine, the bath tub was not. They sent maintenance staff to fix who managed to bring the colour down from Fanta orange to Lemonade yellow after 1 hour. At this point we were just exhausted and wanted to sleep. Next morning we were offered to move rooms but it was two hours until check-out so not much we could have done.

That's without going into how poor some of the food was, although daily in-villa breakfast was okay and the Latin dinner we had at the restaurant by the beach was rather excellent. Genuinely had the worst club sandwich I've ever had in my life. Why club sandwich, you ask? Because the Thai food I ordered earlier was so listless that I thought "surely they couldn't screw up a club sandwich?". I was wrong.

The service after did improve though - we had great staff who serviced us for breakfast every morning in the villa (Oscar) who was very attentive in addition to being the usual warm and friendly. Our food/dietary preferences were very well met, and they started getting accustomed to some of our weirder quirks.

The property is gorgeous on the whole - the villas are great, the residence villas are even nicer. I'm not personally a fan of the 'beach' villas (which are smackbang at the end of the beach and not very private yet the resort's top accommodation before residences), and not all the villas have great privacy - you can also hear neighbours or noise from other villas too, but no real complaints about the hard product.

Considering the generally favourable reviews for this property from here and other places, I'm very much shocked to say the least and willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the property but just curious what the hell happened.