I am a well traveled individual and have stayed at various hotels around the world. This had to be by far one of the worse hotel experiences I have ever had. First - the hotel was NOT in Cabarete, as advertised. Although it is driving distance to Cabarete, it is just past Cabarete in the adjacent town. I have lived in the Dominican Republic for years and many tourists will not realize that the hotel's location is not in actually in Cabarete.
After arriving at the hotel, we were all told that the restaurant was closed, even though the website at the time (which appears to be down now) advertised hours that indicated it would not close until much later at night. To make matters worse, we were told that if we wanted something to eat, we'd have to take a taxi up the dark road to Cabarete, which, to me, was totally unacceptable for 6pm in the afternoon. We felt that the website should be updated to indicate that
The rooms were decent and had full cable. I think when our group went, we were the only ones staying there at the time, with the exception of one person. We decided to take a swim in the nice pool pictured on the hotel's website. We got in our swim gear, grabbed our towels and headed out to the pool, which was across the street. When we got there, we saw the pool water was an dark ocean green color and appeared that it had not been properly cleaned in quite awhile. You could not even smell chlorine as you stood by the pool. We quickly retreated back to our rooms and decided to try our hands at the bar.
The manager told us that he owned the bar across the street as well and that the previous night it saw a packed crowd. We decided to take a shower and head to the bar. The entrance of the bar leads you to a small, but decent dance area and the bar is off to the right in a smaller room. Upon our entrance, the owner turned on the CD player and we sat at the bar to await the big crowds he told us about. The bar's drink prices were a bit higher than what we'd been paying even in the tourist area of Santo Domingo, the Colonial Zone. We stayed at that bar from 9pm - 3am and only 2 people walked in and walked out. We figured that maybe the crowd from the night before had decided to pass on the club that night, or maybe it wasn't as crowded as we were led to believe. We were also told by the manager that many people stopped coming to the club because the police would arrest locals standing in front of it. Hopefully, that has died down. The only plus for that night at the bar was the other guest that was at the hotel was nice. We talked to him outside of the bar and he said that he was not pleased with the hotel either and said he was leaving early, whether he had to pay for it or not. We all decided to just retreat to our rooms and call it a night.
The next morning, since we did not get to have dinner, we were obviously starving. We went downstairs to the garden area and saw that the restaurant was actually adjacent to the garden and outside. We were immediately greeted by at least 25 cats. Some even crawled out of the kitchen via the counter that they pass food over. There was no hot food provided, only cold ham slices, hard cheese, stale bread, and runny eggs. Between swatting away the cats that wanted our food and trying to eat it, we did not enjoy our experience.
Overall, I did not have an enjoyable stay because although this hotel did have a restaurant, pool, and bar, as advertised, it did not offer even the basic service, cleanliness, and hygiene one would expect. In addition, there is no entertainment outside of the bar, which did not get much traffic at all. I would have been better off staying in Santiago or Santo Domingo.
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC
