TripAdvisor Traveler Rating

Overall, a pleasant experience. My wife and I wanted a relaxing trip and Sandals Royal Caribbean fit the bill. While we enjoyed it, it was not without some drawbacks. The resort was smaller and less crowded than I expected; those were pleasant surprises. Noise was a small issue. It was easy to tune out for the most part but if you want completely tranquil then you will be disappointed. There was construction that could be heard from some parts of the resort but I usually did not hear it and/or it didn't bother me. Planes taking off from the airport pass over the resort. When it happens, it can be heard regardless of where you are. I was nervous about the jet noise but it was infrequent and not as bad as I feared. The worst noise pollution came when Sandals entertainment had music playing from speakers at the same time and in the same general area as live entertainment. The dueling noise made it impossible to enjoy either. Our room was by the smaller pool where it was generally quieter. We weren't bothered by the live entertainment at night. It could be different for other rooms closer to the main pool or beach. The beach area was small but fine. Top - claim your beach chairs before you go to breakfast. People respected chairs being claimed. You don't have to stay in them all day. At the beach, a little area is roped off for wading and swimming. Water was mostly clean. Some sea grass drifted in one day. The resort is along a stretch of beach that is protected by a small barrier reef. That means the water is very calm. It also means you won't hear the quintessential sound of waves crashing on the beach. The entertainment provided by Sandals was ok. It wasn't the reason we picked the resort. It was a fine add-on but my wife had other ideas for how we wanted to spend most of our time. If you are relying on the entertainment to fill your time and provide your fun, you'll probably be disappointed. Visit the private island. It's a very quick boat ride to get there. It offers some different views and scenery. The final question is whether it is a luxury resort. I have few experiences to compare it against. I would say that it's not truly luxury in terms of things being high end or everything being tip top service. I didn't care about that so it falling short of true "luxury" didn't bother me. I simply enjoyed being on the water and didn't mind walking 25-50 yards from my spot on the beach to the bar to get a drink. Food was good. Strongly recommend the beef patties at the Mariner. Thai and French restaurants were also good.

My third sandals and absolutely the worst. If I had stayed here as my first sandals I wouldn’t have ever done another one. It was reunion week and there were lots of things broken. The soda machine, our tv, telephone, as well as half the resort closed off for construction. I would think that if your having returning guests come in you would want things working and in order. Also, depending on what bar you were drinking/eating at, they would be out of certain things. One bar ran out of Tito’s, another out of club soda, and another yet out of ginger beer. And speaking of the bar experience one bartender in particular would just ignore you in an effort to be lazy. When I was there, 5 people total were at the bar while he stared off in the opposite direction of patrons. I tried twice to politely get his attention, so much that it became a sort of sad joke amongst the others. Finally I was double overhand waving as if trying to land an airplane. This man was no more than 10 feet away but like I said, actively ignoring the patrons. We left after he would walk around and grab empty drinks but never ask or attempt to refill anything. I know this will go no where, as I’m sure the sandals response is something along the lines of “we strive for excellence “. Unacceptable. I brought this up prior to our leaving and they just said “sorry”. My opinion is some sort of discount should be applied to a following trip, but they just don’t care.

Staff were friendly and food was great. We highly recommend the Jerk Shack on the private island. The room was clean with every amenity you would need. Housekeeping came by several times during the day to take care of our needs. The spa has exceptional service, including beachside massages. We had a couples massage on our anniversary and Avonie and Patricia were wonderful. We would like to recognize Stacey from the private island pool for all the laughs.

Where do I start? There was so many things it’s hard to begin. I tried contacting sandals about the experience but no one wants to get back to me from either the resort or head office, another example of their premium service… When we first arrived we were sat in the concierge office (Club Lounge) waiting for our butler, the office was nice but not somewhere I wanted to be sat for just under an hour while our butler was ‘on his way over’, ‘just making final checks to the room’ etc, it got to a point where multiple people had come and gone with their butler to their rooms and we were sat waiting still, very frustrating! Eventually ‘Jack’ albeit not his actual name as he explained showed up and took us on a tour of the hotel partially with another couple (who had just arrived) which was awkward. Butler service, to my understanding, is feeling like a bit of white glove 1 on 1 during the few minutes you have the butlers attention (we understand they’re split between multiple rooms). This couple eventually dropped off at a restaurant as they were hungry. Is this really the start of our holiday? This service that is built up on your website to be personalised and to take the stress out of everything… being stood up for an hour and group tours of the hotel… already I was struggling to understand if maybe me and my partner expected too much from the offered service, but I’ll get back to that later. I forgot to add while sat waiting in the concierge office we were approached by TWO people about loyalty programmes/sales pitches and trying to get us book another sandals holiday. Sat waiting, growing more and more frustrated and then just being hounded by sales was not my idea of a comfortable and warm welcome. Finally we’re shown our room, remembering that all the excuses for his delay earlier of final checks and personal touches being added to the room etc… we get into the room and ‘Jack’ is picking up rubbish as he’s showing us around, seriously?! We’ve waited an hour for this and then had a 20minute group tour around the resort before being shown to this… after Jack left I found what looked like nail clippings after standing on something sharp. I’m praying to god it was weird looking shells from the sand/beach and not toe nail clippings but I’m 99% it was nail clippings. Nonetheless that means the room wasn’t cleaned properly. At this point I’m upset but trying to keep my partner upbeat as she was feeling very down about the experience so far. I’d booked this because she’d been working so hard and has been away from home for work nearly the entirety of the year so far and we’d been apart for a while. Dinner reservations for the first night, Jack was going to confirm our reservations. Two hours later, no phone call, we’d attempted 3 times in that time to call and confirm as we were aware of the 1600 cut off for reservations, which we were close to when we were shown to our room because guess what… the delays waiting for Jack. Finally my partner had cracked, she went back to the concierge office to see what was happening and spoke to a customer experience manager who was called Kadeen. Kadeen had left my partner feeling somewhat better and reassured her that the service so far WAS NOT ACCEPTABLE nor the ‘normal experience’, promising from now on things would definitely improve drastically. My partner came back to the room in somewhat better spirits which was nice to see, then the butler phone rang, during that conversation she expressed her disappointment so far with the service/room conditions to be told to shrug it off and get on with it, to which she replied “oh so this is my fault then, got it!” At this point i knew this holiday was going to be near on impossible to save. She was in FLOODS OF TEARS and already looking for flights home. I immediately grabbed the phone off her and went to find Kadeen myself. She called the number back and spoke to whoever it was, or should I say tried to speak them. The butler was mid conversation with someone else and Kadeen was struggling to converse with the butler until she finally got through to him that it was Kadeen the manager and not the customer, after a stern talking to the butler she tried to ascertain the conversation that was had with my partner, this whole thing was such a MESS. We’d been on resort for maybe less than four hours and had all this poor experience. We even couldn’t escape the sales patter on the beach, while waiting for the butler to confirm our reservations as mentioned earlier with the 2 hour wait for him to confirm dinner reservations, we went to the beach to sit for a moment, within minutes there was a spa assistant trying to sell us treatments and after saying no 2-3 times just stood at the end of our sunbeds until we essentially ignored her. This made us both feel incredibly uncomfortable. Needless to say we left the beach very quickly. Kadeen wanted some time to investigate everything but insisted we have a free spa treatment on her, we politely declined after having a spa assistant make us feel so awkward earlier (which I explained to Kadeen also). We asked for a new butler and were given Chad and Keno. I want to take a second and say Chad was incredible and did everything to try improve our time on resort, the whole situation was explained to him with the Head Butler service and us when he brought Chad to meet us. The following day we really tried to start fresh and ignore the day before to try at least relax some and enjoy the remainder of our holiday. We walk out of the room and we’re met with the haziest of views, both rubbing our eyes asking if we both were seeing a hazy view in front of us, the dust from the building site next to us was just incredible! Absolutely everything we touched left us with dust on our hands and clothing, every breath tasted of concrete dust, we’d apply sun lotion and within 30-60 minutes your skin would feel gritty to touch from all the dust sticking to our skin. Just about every inch of the resort was covered by dust, plants, railings, stairs, corridors, windows, door handles, card readers. The workers started early around 06:00-06:30, all day all you could hear was scraping/banging/loud machinery, they continued working until late in the evenings 20:00-21:00. It was relentless, our room essentially was a building site. How can anyone enjoy that? We spoke to our room maid who says everyone is leaving our building due to the dust and noise. We speak to Kadeen again who came to our room to have a look and genuinely she looked surprised at how much dust was about. It was in the room too, our clothes were dusty, shoes were dusty… just disgusting conditions for a premium resort. Immediately she apologizes and immediately offers a DOWNGRADED room? Wait, what? A downgraded room…surely not?! We’ve had issue after issue and the first thing you offer is a downgrade? We expressed our dismay and how unhappy we both were with the customer service and the audacity to be offered a downgraded room, in every situation I’ve ever had in any aspect of the service industry, you always try and offer a like for like swap or an upgrade. A downgrade would be the LAST thing to offer to a customer especially one who’s already had many issues, through no fault of our own may I add. Eventually she finds a room after we complained about being offered a downgrade first. The room was better for dust but worse for the noise of the construction, damned if we do, damned if we don’t. I just wanted to take half a breath without feeling like i needed a construction mask to breath some half clean air. The service of 70-80% of the staff was disappointing, service with a sigh, struggled to get a smile, it felt like you were hassling them. The other 20-30% were good however, as you’d expect them to be in the service industry. I genuinely get better service and continuity of service staff willing to help from regular hotels that cost next to nothing of what the cost is for sandals. The car service was fantastic, the drivers both ways were extremely pleasant and polite. The entire experience on resort start to finish was so poor, I couldn’t believe the entire ordeal. We both couldn’t jump into the transfer back from the hotel to airport quick enough; didn’t even bother to wait for our butler Keno to send us off (he was no where to be found). I’ve never wanted to go home when on a holiday before it was over until now. While disappointed with kadeens downgrade offer, we do acknowledge she tried and always tried to see us to make sure we were ok. Again, chad the butler, really did go above and beyond to try and make up for other people’s downfalls. We both were left wondering if this is the normal service or if chad made it his mission to try brighten up our holiday as he was fully aware of everything that had happened. Regardless, he was a glimmer of light during a terrible experience. Needless to say, first impressions are important and Sandals did not leave a very positive or enjoyable first impression.

Initially we did our wedding test drive at the Sandals South Coast resort but after realizing how far the resort is from the airport and knowing we had 35 people attending, we moved forward with our wedding at the Royal Caribbean resort. Yes you're close to the airport and planes are flying over head throughout the day but we didn't mind, we appreciated the travel convenience and you're on vacation - no worries! I highly recommend booking Club Mobay to simplify your airport experience. We got to the resort quickly and we LOVED our swim up room, the surrounding pools and hot tub. Bonus points for the pools being heated. The dinner reservations fill up quickly so plan ahead. We enjoyed all the restaurants pretty equally, but not so much on the French restaurant but they were dealing with construction so maybe that was part of the problem. The resort is quaint and so easy to get around even for those with mobility issues. Getting to and from the private island was a breeze too, and both the Jerk Shack (the fish in foil is a must try) and Thai restaurant were worth the ride! Last but not least, we booked a catamaran cruise - it was awesome! DO IT!! I worked with Kemisha about a year prior to our wedding. She was easy to work with and always answered all of our questions. Once we arrived at the resort we met our wedding planners that didn't let me lift a finger - they were both so wonderful! Thank you so very much Shadeen and Sherika! You made our entire stay, our welcome party and the wedding day so pleasant and resolved any concerns immediately with a smile. The weather looked questionable on the big day so we moved up our wedding time last minute and even such a major change was no issue for these ladies! Sandals is lucky to have you both! Additionally our wedding photographers, Jason and Kevin Hart 4.0 (I forgot his actual name, Shaun?) were so fun! KH 4.0 met me in the spa while I was getting my hair and makeup done. Also...shout out to Nadine who did a wonderful job on my hair and makeup! She did my hair and makeup trail as well as on the wedding day - she was so sweet. KH 4.0 noticed I didn't have a glass of champagne and offered to get me a drink. He kept all of us smiling and laughing at the spa. Jason who was managing the video and helping out KH 4.0 was also awesome! He was so helpful and so pleasant!! Both gentlemen kept us smiling and feeling good, plus we are so so happy with how the pictures and wedding video turned out. THANK YOU ALL!