Originally Posted by MumbaiDan

We just got back from a 12 day stay.
We had booked a 2 bedroom OW Sunset Villa. Of course it was Villa 212 that was allocated to us. I did not really feel the lack of privacy others on this forum eluded to. More I think it is actually having much more light than the other Villas in that area. The space of the room is great and the pool was sufficient for us as well. My only criticism would be that the sea around this area can be very low tide at times and it makes it very challenging to get into the water over the steps. Also swimming in this area of the resort is good for snorkelling, but not for actual swimming. But the biggest problem for me was the lack of shadow/ sun cover. From basically 11am onwards you are completely exposed and it gets extremely hot (during our entire stay it was 31 degrees plus and very little clouds). We asked for an umbrella and were told there is none for these rooms. Which itself is completely crazy - these rooms should all have umbrellas otherwise you cant use the deck without getting burned. For a family this is totally non suited. I then asked for being moved to another room. Magically an umbrella appeared. But further requests to change the room (just for some change after six days, we got a bit bored with this section of the resort and would have preferred to be on the other side of the island where the beach is much nicer) were ignored. And I mean ignored. They did not say its not possible, but just never addressed it, even though I asked several times for options.
Staff are all very kind and helpful. But they very clearly lack management attention and some of them appear a bit helpless as they are not provided with the necessary training and tools.
The St Regis Butler concept works well, I find it annoying though that they clearly want to sell you activities every day and even pro actively book you things you did not ask for. But the Butler was kind and understood after a few days that we were not interested in 1000 USD Spa treatments.
If you stay longer than 8 nights you get a free dinner and some other amenities as a "long stay benefit" offered pro actively by them. That was appreciated.
At the restaurants the 10% elite discount was applied for the first few days and then just stopped to be. Was told it would be taken off my bill. It was not. Did not have the energy to argue with them.
The property itself is beautiful, but as was mentioned before in other posts they do hardly any maintenance. So it already shows and therefore there are constant problems. We had a broken ac, two broken toilets, several problems with lights and a deck that was basically held together with nails and made walking bare feet impossible. The stills the house stands on have also started moving and I guess in a few years this will become a static problem.
One huge issue for me is the lack of attention to detail in regards to sanitary cleanliness. For some cultures certain smells and dirt might be normal/acceptable. For me it is not, I need a place to smell neutral and I need the bed linen, the towels etc to be clean. Also when I take a water bottle I expect these bottles to be properly cleaned before I drink from it. Unfortunately here they lack attention. While they clean the room twice a day they don't clean it thoroughly and spray the place like an Indian Bazaar. It distracts from the not so good smells in the rooms, but only for so long and in reality for me the Bazaar smell was disgusting. I asked them to stop using it and was told that this is mandatory. I thought they sprayed even more afterwards. Every second day we had linen with yellow stains, most towels had stains on them. And one day at the Gym the bottles were not wiped and I got a really bad one with puke like smell on it. I was sick for a day.
Another day there was a broken pipe just behind our villa, for two days it smelled like a dump when we were on the deck. No apology offered, again no activity from management. Our butler was ashamed I could feel.
The food was very good in all of the restaurants. There is lots of choice and different cuisines. Our favourite was clearly Cargo with an amazing Middle eastern Grill selection. Very high quality. The one thing here I would need to criticize is that most beef dishes are Wagyu. I am not a particular fan of this meat. There is no single good piece of meat on this Island that is not Wagyu. The Whale Bar food was rather unappealing.
I can recommend the SPA and the blue hole, really cool experience. Also dolphin watching was fun, we saw so many dolphins.
As in so many Marriott establishments the Management was not to be seen. Not once in 12 days we saw the GM anywhere. There was no members cocktail, there was no sabering ritual, just nothing.
So overall we had a great holiday. But there are better hotels in the Maldives.