77 reviews
Not so dreamy....
The hotel property is nice, staff are eager to help, friendly and polite. The beach is great, so are the pools. However, even though the upkeep and look of the resort are fairly good, the place is definitely not a five-star property.
In general, we did not enjoy the food for most meals. It lacked flavour. Buffet items were constantly mis-labelled throughout our 5-day stay, at all meals. Some of those were very obvious (a dessert labelled as 'grilled vegetables'), while for some dishes it was hard to decipher what it contained (everyone is not familiar with every cuisine, and a basic description of whether an item was beef, pork, fish, etc would be helpful). We did bring this to the notice of the customer experience agent and the F&B manager, but didn't notice any change on subsequent days. The buffet restaurant World Cafe did not pay attention to food safety and didn't maintain the cold-chain - things like ham and cold-cuts were out too long, and developed a funky taste. We were asked about food allergies, but preferences were not generally taken into consideration - there were hardly any hot dishes with vegetables, vegan or gluten-free options - there were just either grilled or sauteed peppers, the same raw veggies and dressings in the salad bar on repeat for almost every meal, and a couple of very sad-looking, almost dryish, gluten-free bread options.
Food at Himitsu was absolutely terrible on Dec 25. There were absolutely no Thai flavours whatsoever in the Thai curry, and everything was very salty. We found this very disappointing after waiting an hour to get a table.
The resort must take into consideration CULTURAL preferences wrt food too, rather than just allergies (i.e. people may have religious or cultural restrictions on consumption of beef or pork). Better labelling of food items and a few more hot vegetable/vegetarian/vegan dishes would make it easier for people to choose, and would go a long way in bringing repeat guests.
Also, the bar menu mentioned whiskey sour as one of the drinks on offer, but one of the bartenders in the bar right by one of the pools did not know what I was referring to when I requested one.
On the positive side, the chocolate desserts and coffee were consistently very good all throughout the F&B outlets. Food at Portofino was decent - while I wouldn't classify it as great Italian cuisine, it was reasonably tasty. The tomato soup and bread served at the table were great! Portofino though lacked variety in the menu - a few additional choices would be welcome if people chose to eat at the same restaurant multiple times during a week's stay.
Their towel service was very badly-managed too. From Dec 25 to Dec 30, we managed to obtain towels on the first try only once. For the rest of the days, every time we went to the counter, we were asked to come back 'after half an hour', and even then there were no clean towels available, to the point where we just used our own towels that we had got from home. We saw this happen to a few other guests as well. For a beach resort which calls itself a five-star property, this is absolutely unacceptable. They are fully aware of occupancy levels at any given time, therefore must ensure sufficient clean towels are always available during pool hours.
Overall, even though the beach was fantastic, we wouldn't visit this resort again since it was not good value for money.
