My wife and I stayed at the occidental grand in aruba in August 2011 for our honeymoon. The food was excellent. We recommend getting the Royal Club. With the Royal Club you have access to a personal restaurant for all members of the club. Room service to your room at no charge. There are also two personal attendants on the upper floors to help you with all your vacation needs. Both these attendants are only for Royal Club members. With the Royal Club you also get top shelf liquor. I recommend making reservations to all the different night dinners, especially the oriental!! The pool has a pool bar and is pretty big. We had a great time, and we know you will too. Room was beautiful and very clean.

We stayed at The Occidental Grand during Christmas Week and loved it.
We did upgrade to Royal Club which I highly recommend. Royal Club has concierge service, personal dining room and can also get you a dinner reservation at all restaurants on the property. The Royal club group were quite helpful with outside reservations and attractions as well.
We have stayed at The Occidental before and love it for the great long beach and the great nightlife outside of the hotel. It is all right there within walking distance and you always feel safe.
Yes, The Occidental is really pushing timeshare these days but I just ignored them and you can too.
The staff at the restaurants and bars were all quite friendly and loved the swim up bar.

My boyfriend and I stayed at the occidental grand Aruba for a week. We arrived on a Wednesday, flew through customs, checked right into room 1402. Room was very clean and overlooked the pool. No musty smell, no nothing. The hotel did reserve our dining for us which was fine. If you want to change anything, just ask. They will do it for you. Yes, they are big on the "vacation club" but we just said "no thank you, we are all set". They never bothered us again. The pool bar is great, the beach is even better. We did get up (well my boyfriend did!) early around 530am to reserve a palapa on the beach. It gets very crowded. We even saw a great palapa fight between people because their things got moved by someone else, pretty ridiculous. Smile people, your in Aruba! The occidental beach was the cleanest I thought. We walked all up and down the beach and everywhere else had a lot of seaweed. We also bought a drink holder at one of the stores, the bars will fill it up with whatever you want. Beer, Miami vice, blue Hawaii or just water! Make sure you go to the De Palm store and get 2 rafts that you can use in the water. You just have to leave a credit card with them. They don't charge you, just bring it back by 4pm. Be aware of raft theives though! We ventured off to El Gaucho which was awesome. Also to Madame Jeannettes, even more awesome. Great shopping across the street. Also señor frogs is a 5 minute walk. Be sure to visit the Bugaloo bar and Piets pier bar. Great happy hours and beautiful view of the sunset! Bartenders were great as well. We ate at the hibachi (which they don't tell u they have so make sure you reserve). Hibachi was great and lots of fun. The Italian was great too but our waiter said all but 3 words to us which we thought was weird, he either had no personality or just had a long day. The breakfast Buffett was yummy. Had no problem ever getting a seat! Lunch was the same! Lobby bar was always packed. We visited the disco once and there were not many people inside. Casino was OK, we went to the Marriott Stelaris casino as well which is much bigger. Beware of smokers!!! Jolly pirate is a must do as well as the carribean sunset cruise! Aruba is a spectacular island. People are sweet and will answer any questions you may have. They are very informative. Our fridge was also re stocked daily with water and soda. We met so many great people. I absolutely loved this hotel and will certainly return. Any questions please feel free to ask!

I will start this review by saying we met up with some friends for this vacation which made it the best ever all inclusive, if we had not had friends there it would have been average to below average.

The best review I can give to the hotel is the wait staff, especially Quintina, Cesar and Allen. We spent A LOT of time at the swim up bar and they were fantastic. Freddy in the lobby bar was great as well. All the servers in the resturants and hosts/ hostess were super friendly!!

Now for all things average........ The rooms were so so, luckily we didn't get one that smelled bad but it didn't seem especially clean, but what can you expect w/ all the sand and moisture in the air. There was not any liquor in the rooms which means you have to go to the bar whenever you want a drink or bring your own, we brought our own which meant we needed lots of coke and ice, they weren't very good about stocking the cokes, only 3 or 4 cans a day. MY ADVICE, GET A BIG CUP AND BRING IT WITH YOU, FIND A BIG BUBBA ON AMAZON, BET $10 SPENT EVER. The food was so so, make sure to remember that there at 2 lunch buffets, one by the lobby on lower level and one out by the pool and beach. The Zen was awesome and making a reservation for a grill top table is soooo worth it.

Now for the BAD, and please take note that my wife and I like to stay up late, drink, dance and party so this may not be bad for some but the entertainment at the resort was bad, this resort was very much centered around the fact that it catered to an older crowd, every night we would goto the same dance club in the corner of the building and were lucky if 10 ppl were there. The best night is Karaokee night, lots of ppl showed up for terrible singing, I apologize again for that as well. We also noticed that during the day the activies for around the pool area were boring.

All in all great trip but wont stay at thsi hotel again!