The resort itself is beautiful and well maintained, but the overall experience was significantly undermined by what felt like a deliberate, manipulative design strategy intended to keep guests captive on property and spending as much as possible.
From the start, it’s clear the resort is structured to discourage guests from coming and going freely. Valet-only parking, gated entry and exit with scanning every time, and an overall layout that adds friction to leaving all contribute to the feeling that you are being intentionally funneled into staying on campus. This might be acceptable if the on-site value matched the pricing—but it didn’t.
Once “stuck” on property, the pricing model becomes impossible to ignore. The resort layers mandatory 22% gratuities on nearly everything, along with various service and restocking fees, on top of already premium prices. These charges are not optional, not always clearly justified, and add up quickly. At one point, I paid over $8 for a very small Coke, which perfectly captured the broader issue: high prices paired with low perceived value.
We genuinely wanted to enjoy more of what the resort had to offer, but instead found ourselves leaving the property whenever possible because staying felt financially punitive rather than relaxing. That alone should say a lot about the experience.
We had planned ahead to book a couples massage at the spa. While $500 for a couples massage is already expensive, it’s at least understandable for a luxury resort. However, once the resort’s mandatory additional 22% was applied, the cost ballooned to nearly $600, which felt wildly disproportionate to the experience delivered—especially when similar services elsewhere cost a fraction of that. This pattern repeated across multiple amenities.
The issue here isn’t luxury pricing—it’s value mismatch and forced add-ons. I am more than willing to pay premium prices when the experience, transparency, and quality justify it. In this case, they often did not. The resort feels less like a luxury destination and more like a carefully engineered system designed to extract maximum spend from a captive audience. Lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes.
That said, the staff were outstanding—friendly, professional, and genuinely helpful throughout our stay. They were easily the highlight of the experience and clearly not the problem. Unfortunately, they are operating within policies that detract from what could otherwise be a truly great resort.