We had heard some great reviews about this place and were so excited to try it out. But what a disappointment. We had stayed here when it was a Hilton with regular prices and now where they charge $1000 a night expected some changes. But not really. This place lives off of their location. The value for your money is just not there.
1. Hotel rooms are very basic, I had much better rooms at a Hampton Inn. There is no decent decoration, we had a picture with fishing hooks. Instead of storage like most hotels, they give you a table for the TV, which takes out all the storage drawers in normal hotels. We were a family of 4 in the room for almost a week, we had to store our stuff on the tables, in the suitcases and the tiny 3 drawer storage inside the closet. Not enough hangers for storage either.
2. Shower stopped working on the second day, at least the engineer immediately knew which part broke and replaced it, reoccurring problem?
3. The location is beautiful, right on the beach, hammock beach is very peaceful (although only one hammock). The problem is that when it’s busy, you will have a hard time getting a beach chair, people placed towels on the chairs early in the morning in order to get one later on. For the price you would think a place that calls itself luxury resort they would be able to afford more beach chairs.
4. It was nice to have an adult pool, but the water was crazy cold, not sure why, but it was too uncomfortable to swim even though the ocean was fine. For a place that calls itself luxury, you should also offer an adult hot tub, when 6 kids around 5 years old invaded the hot tub with their pool noodles, hitting each other, we had to leave.
5. Bartender during some of the days we were there was clearly very unhappy at being there. Grumpy and the drinks were just not good. He seemed overworked, so might be more of a staffing issue.
6. Now to the main staffing issue we had. The front desk is a mess. They all need to be retrained in order to know how to do their job. I checked in on the Hilton app on our way down, but we arrived way before check in, so I figured I’d try to see if we could check in early. I never expect an early check in, but sometimes had luck getting a room early, so I thought it was worth a try. The lady at the check in asked for my ID and “supposedly” checked us in and the hotel would send a text (she confirmed my cell number) when the room was ready. We had reservations at a nearby restaurant for lunch and left for our reservation. By the way Hotel Playa Largo had way more amenities for kids and the same great location, so for a cheaper room rate this might be a better option. So we came back to Baker’s Cay and explored the resort, spending some time at hammock beach with no cell signal. So after we waited several hours and it was close to the check in time, we figured we had just missed a text. When we got to the front desk, another front desk agent looked at our reservation and told us we were not checked in and we would have never gotten a text because neither the app check in nor the previous lady checking us in had actually done so? Not sure if she was just wrong or the first person had invalidated our app check in. The front desk agent was actually kind of making fun of the fact that the check in wasn’t done right, all the while the agent who had supposedly checked us in was standing right next to her and overheard the conversation. She never apologized or clarified what happened. Well, this was only the start of our front desk fiasco. Next day afternoon my kids wanted to grab something from the room and the keys had stopped working. Waiting in a barely moving front desk line, shivering because I was wet from having been at the beach, I was finally informed that they had messed up the combining of separate reservations I had made and that’s why the keys were not working. I had contacted the hotel in advance and the Assistant Front Office Manager assured me that they had combined the reservations and everything was all set. After this was obviously not done right, I contacted the front desk to make sure this wouldn’t happen again and was assured by s, that another front desk agent that they had ensured the keys were made for the entire stay and this would not happen again. Well, again they either didn’t even check or have no idea how to do their job, because the next day, the keys stopped working AGAIN. This time I was not going to waste time standing in line at the front desk and contacted the desk on the app to send up new keys, which they did. I again tried to get them to fix this issue. But again the next day the keys stopped working. This time we had to waste an hour waiting for an engineer to check the lock because “it couldn’t possibly be the front desk fault”. Well, there was nothing wrong with the lock and we wasted an hour of our vacation. It just really made this stay so uncomfortable because you never knew if you would be able to access your room or not, definitely not what I expected from a place that calls itself luxury.
7. As a Diamon member we were supposedly upgraded to a king size room with a sofa bed. Well, Hilton should be ashamed to call this sofa bed a bed. It was the worst sofa bed any of us have ever slept in. If you moved a muscle you would wake up the whole room because it was so creaky, but the worst was the springs. They were just digging into your back, leaving you in pain and making it impossible to sleep. We had to rotate who slept on the sofa bed, because even our kids couldn’t handle sleeping there. My daughter was in tears about having to sleep on it the second day. This should not be offered as a sleeping option, especially in a place that charges $1000 a night and calls itself luxury. Their rooms are worse than the Fairfield Inn we stayed at on our way to Key Largo. Every Hampton Inn we have been at had better sofa beds.
8. If you want to spend an insane amount for the location, go ahead, if you want luxury, I would recommend looking elsewhere.
