To start off, The Bahamas are beautiful—you really can’t go wrong in that respect. However, we won’t be coming back here, and I’m sad to say I think I’m done with Sandals. Our trip as a whole was great, but the resort felt like a motel 6.
Echoing much of what I read on TripAdvisor before we left, the service was terrible. I felt like I should have been apologizing every time I asked for something. Sometimes we were simply ignored.
Believe everything you hear about the musty/moldy smell in the East Bay building. Our room wasn't bad but the hallways were gross,
One of the nights we were there, the power went out. Hey, that’s life—it happens. But there was no communication about why it was out, how long it would last, or anything else. The resort was poorly lit at night along the pathways even when the power was on, but one poor lady completely smashed up her face because she couldn’t see where she was walking and fell. The power ended up being out for about three hours, though it wasn’t out in the rooms—just in the restaurants and entertainment areas.
We did have one favorite bartender—“T Money,” I think they called him—who we really liked. Other than that, it was often hard to get a drink. There was a wonderful bartender in the piano bar, but there is no way on this Earth he should have been working alone.
Reservations aren’t necessarily going to be honored. In another review I read, someone mentioned that they felt as though, because they didn’t have butler service, they weren’t treated as well—for example, not getting reservations, or suddenly being told there were none once staff realized they weren’t in a butler-level room. While we were at the resort, we ran into several couples complaining about their butlers: they weren’t listening to what guests wanted to do or where they wanted to go. I can’t speak to that personally, but it’s worth noting if that’s what you’re booking for.
I’d love to tell you how the food was at Butch’s, but we sat at our table for 15 minutes (in a non-crowded restaurant, mind you) and no one came. This was after waiting 15 minutes past our reservation time to be seated, even though we had shown up five minutes early. Several couples who arrived after us with reservations at the same time were seated before us. Several days it seemed like they were out of literally everything we wanted. This was weird especially because we Honeymoon-ed in St. Lucia in 2021 when supply chain issues were still bad from Covid and they were never lacking anything.
There was a WONDERFUL singer at one of the performances one night—I didn’t get his name. But shows didn’t start at the times listed and often weren’t in the locations listed (so don’t bother using the app they tell you to download; it’s inaccurate and you can’t make reservations with it either).
I did send a long email to customer service. (BY THE WAY - customer service basically shrugged and said "oh well" to my email so that was cool.) One of my biggest complaints was that it felt to me (and everyone else we spoke with at the resort) like they made up the boat schedule to the private island as they wished. Some reviews I’ve seen blamed this on “island time.” Uhm, no. Not when people are paying island prices. My husband and I, having been to a Sandals resort before, brought our own snorkel gear. The couple we traveled with did not, and they had to wait an hour later than the schedule stated for snorkeling gear to be distributed on the private island. The island has odd hours, so losing that hour of snorkeling was a big disappointment.
On a couple of days, half the menu at the restaurant wasn’t available, and the food wasn’t very good to begin with.
My photo voucher wasn’t honored, and after a lot of back-and-forth with the front desk, I gave up because my shuttle to the airport had arrived. (They had accidentally given it to the couple we traveled with instead of us, so we never saw it.)
All in all, I enjoyed spending time with my husband. But before anyone comes at me with “your trip is what you make it,” let me be clear: we didn’t spend thousands of dollars, arrange child care, arrange pet care, and take time off work just to have to “make” the resort ourselves. Either Sandals has really gone downhill in the last couple of years, or it’s just this particular resort—but we won’t be back.
