I am about to check out after a three-night stay here and have to provide a very dissenting view to some of the opinions above. A large part of luxury for me is things being well designed / not requiring effort and this hotel is a total failure there. Overall, I found this place confusing and I'm not much clearer what a RC Reserve actually is than when I checked in.
Positives first:
- Service may have been the most friendly of anywhere I've ever stayed. Every single member of staff was happy and laid back, clearly thought has gone into making guests feel good after interactions
- The setting on Phang Nga Bay is stunning. My first time in this part of Thailand and it won't be my last. Lazing by the pool looking over the bay was a delight
- The airport transfer was slick and well handled
- A lot of the landscaping around the resort is beautiful (others bits are hideous though, why is there a random totally out of place Balinese water feature taking up half of the resort?)
- The bedding they use is great
Now, to the negatives. Most relate to one thing - the hard product is INFURIATING. Whilst the villa looks impressive, almost nothing is practical. It is like staying in a temple/church where no thought has been given to making it livable. I sent a photo of the interior to my parents and the cutting response I got back was "that looks like something from MTV Cribs". That is exactly what it felt like, a hard product designed by someone with an almost limitless budget who thinks luxury is living in a fairytale castle. So many things are ugly, vulgar and over the top purely for the sake of it. What do I mean?
- The double length bed takes up nearly half of the villa bedroom floorspace. It is blocked on three sides, so you have to climb into/out of it only on the short edge. To go from outside through the bedroom you have to walk around the length of the entire bed every time. There are no sockets by the bed.
- The villa is a light sleeper's nightmare. The ceilings are double / triple height with a large window inexplicably placed ABOVE the bed with no way to cover it. I didn't appreciate falling asleep jetlagged at 5am to be woken up by light streaming into the room an hour later at 6am. Same thing with a thunderstorm last night where lightening illuminates the entire bedroom. It feels a bit like being in a budget horror movie. The air conditioning cools very effectively but banged loudly at random intervals just to make sure a good night's sleep is impossible.
- As noted by
escape4 , the villas are semi-detached and it rather destroys any sense of isolation to hear your neighbours in the garden. Worse, the villas have very poor interior sound isolation so I got treated to repeated shouts of "
Sawasdee Kha! Room Service! Hello!" when laying in bed in the morning whilst the staff tried to get the attention of next door in vain.
- The bathroom surfaces are at the correct height for a 5 foot 4 Thai lady, however, anyone 6ft or above will spent a lot of time bending over. I burnt myself several times before I got used to all of the different taps. The shower has two big brass hot and cold taps with no separate flow and temperature controls. There is a massive delay and basically the settings are not much more sophisticated than 'on' and 'off', so it takes 1-2 minutes of turning the taps backwards and forwards every time you want a shower to find a semi-acceptable temperature. The toiletries are in ceramic vessels without dispensers, so you have to tip them over and shake them like a glass ketchup bottle, hoping enough comes out but not the entire contents each time.
- Whilst the bedroom is filled with natural light whether you like it or not, lighting at night is poor, with no separate lamps and basically the option of all the lights on or off, no properly lit place to shave / apply make-up, etc.
I could go on.
Equally, whilst service was extremely friendly, this is not Aman-style anticipatory luxury. Indeed, I've had better service at other standard Ritz-Carlton resorts. Housekeeping yesterday a case in point. I left my villa mid-morning to go spend a few hours by the pool and then had an activity booked through the hotel for 3pm. My butler came by whilst I was by the pool about lunchtime to have a chat, so they knew exactly what I was doing. What is the only time all day they should avoid trying to clean my room? Just before 3pm. What did I find when I went back to the villa to try to have a shower just after 2.30pm? They were in the middle of cleaning my villa.
Food was fine but frankly not to the standard of other high-end luxury resorts this place imagines it is competing with. Watery cappuccino with breakfast, relatively limited variety of breakfast options. The Thai restaurant was quite nice.
This is not going to win me any friends, but my overall impression was this is basically Disneyland for the newly wealthy from developing Asian countries. I am going to be very glad to check out and head back to Bangkok in an hour.