When we booked this hotel our main search criteria was a private pool villa at a resort with great facilities including a kids club for our active 8 and 10 year olds.
The villa was fine, really nice design, lots of space. The main bedroom was very comfortable and relaxing, though we would have preferred to have a door on the ensuite bathroom. The living area was good, although the kitchen equipment was too basic for a 5 star villa, with cheap knives, no wok, colander etc, it looked like it had been fitted out cheaply from Ikea.
Also the choice of TV channels was limited, mainly sport and news, and the only TV guides provided were for sport channels. This is a real shame, the villas should have Foxtel/Austar with movie channels, kids channels etc.
The villas are called 'beach front villas' but I have no idea why as there is no view of the sea, they just happen to be on the side of the resort that is near the beach.
When we arrived we asked to book our kids into the kids club as they were looking forward to it, but we were told that there was no club running despite it being clearly advertised on their website as running in the school holidays. The staff seemed unaware of this and I had to show them their own website on my iPad before they would believe us. At this point we were offered a $60 discount per day. This hardly made up for the lack of a kids club though. Later in the week we found out that the wildlife sanctuary just around the corner had been running a kids club every day through the holidays, our kids would have loved to join this but it was too late when we found out - this is the sort of information that the hotel staff should have been able to provide us with. Very disappointing service.
The hotel has a good lagoon pool that is safe for kids. There was no play equipment at all, which was a shame. I think this resort is really mainly for couples who like sport and spa treatments, not for families, and that is fine but it is clearly marketed on their website as a family-friendly resort so we felt a bit cheated. At the pool bar a children's crush drink is $8.50, which is quite ridiculous.
Coming on to the pricing - when we booked the hotel we were happy to pay $750 per night for what we thought would be similar to the 5 star resorts we have stayed at in Asia - with warm and friendly service, lots for the kids to do, top quality in everything, but this was not the case so we felt that we were getting poor value for money at Sea Temple. The service was particularly lacklustre, the staff had quite a poor attitude to guests in our opinion. We were also unhappy about having to pay $40 in bus fares every time we wanted to hop into the town, a 10 minute drive away. At $750 per night a free shuttle bus should really be included.
Quite by chance we discovered on our second day that some of the villas are privately owned, and the villa two doors up was available through Stayz for $450 per night, which was $300 a day less than we were paying. Result! We checked its availability and went to discuss it with the duty manager. He was unnecessarily off-hand with us about it, and even told us that if we moved we would not get use of the lagoon pool, which was completely untrue as the privately owned villas have access to everything included.
So we decided to move and we enjoyed the rest of our holiday knowing that we were saving $1500 which we put towards taking the family on lots of trips and activities, and to booking some babysitting from the local service, which was excellent.
I would not recommend this resort to anyone looking for a friendly, relaxed family holiday, it simply doesn't compare to what you would find in Thailand etc. (no wonder the tourism industry in Australia is struggling!), although I'm sure it would be a nice place to stay as a couple or for a getaway with girlfriends.
If the hotel management reads and responds to this post I have no doubt that it will be defensive and negative, as this seems to be the benchmark for their customer service. It is a real shame, as this could be a great resort if the hotel appeared to value its guests and was warm and positive towards them.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
