Had a very good stay at this property. It is certainly a unique and stunning setting. I used a TSU to confirm a terrace suite. The room itself wasn't configured as a "suite," but had a very large bathroom. The terrace was the special thing, which was great for sunrise/sunset and stargazing at night.

Service is to a very high standard and the staff are very friendly and accommodating. It seems that all reservations include at least breakfast, which was served in the restaurant a la carte, with a bread basket, salad, fruit, and cheese/cured meats plate coming automatically. Food for all meals was generally pretty good.

I was a bit disappointed in the common areas in the main building, which is a shame since this was obviously a purpose-built property. There is really no pleasant place to hang out indoors; the lobby area is too small and not really set up in a way that encourages sitting and reading a book, for example. It would also be nice if they offered a coffee/tea service in the lobby - it's free in the rooms and at breakfast anyway, so there's no revenue stream to protect, but it would be a nice amenity and again make the common spaces more inviting.

Did the hike to the dam - 6.5km and 3 hours roundtrip from the trailhead is what they estimate. It was a good hike, though got a bit tedious in the riverbed portion.

The drive from Muscat was safe and very easy. From the base to the resort it takes about an hour, and the roads are wide, well maintained, and have guardrails most of the time. You definitely need 4WD in order to get past the police checkpoint, but there is zero need for it to actually get to or from the resort. The one potential benefit of such a vehicle is that some of them have a special downhill mode that uses the engine as a break - our rental car made an awful noise when I tried to use that function and so I disabled it and just used the breaks to moderate speed with no problem.

Spent three nights, which was the minimum for a points booking, and about the maximum I could see myself spending at the property. There's not a lot to do on the mountain as far as I could tell, and the drive up/down is long and tedious enough that I wouldn't want to make day trips to places like Nizwa (which is worth visiting on the way to/from the property).

I had originally thought about just renting a car for the Jabal Akhdar portion of the trip, but it's actually really useful to have a car in Muscat - it's spread out far enough that you need some form of transportation to do anything, and driving was fairly easy. A lot of parking in key places requires payment at certain times of day, and this is apparently done through SMS - fortunately I wasn't parking during paid periods, as I don't know if an international SMS would work. The only issue is that Google Maps directions are not great - sometimes it would do things like tell you to get off a road/highway, make a few unnecessary turns/u-turns, and then get right back on. Having someone else in the car who can review the directions while you're driving and tell you when to ignore or override Google's instructions is very helpful. There were also times when Google would say things like "Turn right on" and then not say a street name because Google would only have the name of the road in Arabic. Again helpful to have a person to help, or at least a phone holder that keeps the phone up high on the dashboard for these situations.