My hotel review for TripAdvisor

This is a hotel that has pretty much all the pieces to make for a good hotel, but they don’t quite fit. The hotel is terraced and wraps around a hillside, which gives all of its rooms good views, and the rooms are a nice size (time for some new TV’s though). But the terracing robs the hotel of a natural center of activity because the lobby is so far from the spa, pool and beach and associated restaurants as to require a shuttle or a lot of stairs. 

The pool is huge and beautiful, but the water is too cold so in the week I stayed here I never saw more than a few scattered people in it. The beach is small but nice; the ocean bottom is too rocky (coral-y I guess) to comfortably walk into the water. There always seem to be enough lounge chairs available. There’s a lovely rooftop terrace that would be a nice place to sit if there were any chairs.

The food is pretty good, but the service is atrocious, and though the all-inclusive plan includes what they call 7 different restaurants, there are never more than 2 or 3 available, in part because one restaurant is called 3 different things. The reservations-only restaurant, Baci, had no busboys when we ate there, so the hostess would disappear for 5 minutes every time a table turned so she could clear and re-set it. It took a good 15 minutes for us to be seated at a table that had been empty since we’d arrived. When we ate at Manor House, the main restaurant, our waiter failed to tell us there were specials and disappeared for long periods of time. At breakfast, it was hard to find a waitress once we were seated. The one espresso machine in the place (not all-included) broke the day we arrived and never got fixed (Our favorite line: Q: When will the espresso machine be fixed? A: It only broke yesterday). As a result we ended up eating dinner out a couple of times.

A few more details: We chose the hotel in large part because of its spa. I didn’t use the spa myself but my family members who did said it was great as advertised. The workout room was nice and well-equipped. Vernill at the Tour Desk was wonderful.

The hotel is what they call “cat-friendly,” which means the outside areas are crawling with them. They’re cute and don’t bother you, but don’t come here if you hate cats.

The safe in our room malfunctioned twice. When we first arrived it was stuck open. More scarily, two hours before we were set to leave it locked itself and refused to open. A security worker finally got it to open an hour later and I carried our valuables with us for the rest of the time. The front desk then tried to charge me for the phone calls he made from the room trying to make the safe operational.

Make sure to join the Wyndham ByRequest before you go. It's the only way to get free wireless internet.