All resorts price gouge. No one is forcing you to stay or pay their prices.

Regarding your ninja edit about me missing out on key Thailand experience, I appreciate your concern but I can assure you I’m not missing out. I just decided to post a recent data point in a thread specific to a particular hotel.

Regarding F&B at Vana Belle being less than half, that’s good to know for future as I like to stay at different hotels unless I have a specific reason to do a repeat stay. As I mentioned in my original post I booked RC via points. I don’t recall what the price in points was for Vana Belle or other hotels. My goal was to burn the 90K points I had for the “best” available property on my dates. In this particular case my definition of best was a combination of guest review rating + my available points balance. I don’t remember of the top of my head whether Vana Belle needed more points than I had or had a lower review score on google/Marriott versus RC but RC is what I ended up booking.

A bit more granular breakdown of the lunch restaurant by the pool, food cost base prices on average 500THB i.e. pizza or burger. Comparing this to price of same items off of the resort is silly and in fact I’d say they are actually very reasonable all things considered. Calamari dish was more expensive at 780THB but in my opinion given how good it was I would gladly pay this price for this specific dish anywhere. Beer and mixed drinks pricing is the real killer with a bottle of beer being ~350THB++ and drinks 450THB++ but then again what does a mixed drink cost at any high end hotel/bar/restaurant anywhere in the world? I genuinely don’t know anymore because I don’t drink much but I’m pretty sure it’s at least this much.

Overall I’m happy with this stay at the RC but I doubt I’ll be back. This is nothing to do with F&B costs or due to any issues with the resort but mainly because there are too many hotels that I’d like to try including another new one to me tomorrow.