This place is pretty bad. It's absolutely beautiful outside, being located in the fantastically…read morelandscaped Palmas Del Mar community. It's a golfer's fantasy. But once you look past the pretty scenery, you'll find that this hotel is lacking in many areas.
First, the guest rooms. Boy are these run down. My room had no fridge and the deadbolt on the patio door was busted, so I had to use a ghetto pin thing to keep it from being opened from the outside. The ceiling in the bathroom needed paint badly, and there was often not enough hot water in the shower. Their housekeeping staff was pretty forgetful too. On one day they forgot to give me any face cloths. On another day they forgot to give me any hand towels. Checklist, anyone? The worst part about the room is that there was virtually no sound isolation from the hallway, meaning you could hear every hallway conversation and all the music from the main lobby. Lots of noise continuing past midnight every night.
It shouldn't take 45 minutes to microwave an $18 steak.
That's what I have to say about the hotel's only sit-down restaurant, Sebastian's, which is pretty bad. I went on a quiet Monday night when the restaurant was only at half capacity, but they were running extremely slow anyways. The guys next to us had to wait half an hour for their appetizers. I had to wait 45 minutes for my "medium" steak which was very well done, chewy, and had no juices on top... which to me means it was microwaved or otherwise reheated. The wait staff, although not rude, was pretty much uninterested in the guests and took forever to do anything like fill water or run your credit card.
Then there's the hotel's "bar", which is supposed to be a wine boutique. All of the tables outside the bar had a flier advertising a 5-7pm happy hour, with no additional details. So I went in and asked the bartender about it, and he asserted that there was no 5-7pm happy hour. So I picked up a flier off the table and handed to him, and he went and asked a manager about it. The manager told him it was "$2.50 for beers, $4 for rum drinks". What, no wine specials in a wine boutique? Anyways, I went back the next evening to take part in the happy hour. When I got the check, they had charged me $3.50 a beer, $6 for my Captain (rum) and coke, and $4.50 for my Bacardi (rum) and ginger ale. When I called BS, the bartender (same guy) asserted that he'd previously said $3.50 a beer and $4 for HOUSE rum drinks, which included DonQ rum only. Seriously, screw you guys.
The property outside of the rooms is pretty nice, with a decent pool, jacuzzi, and a one minute walk across the golf course grass to get to the beautiful looking beach. However, the beach has a terrible seaweed problem. On all but one of our trips to the beach (we were at the beach a lot), there was a ridiculous amount of seaweed floating in the water that all got caught in your hair and stuff. Maybe in the winter the ocean is better, but damn. As for the pool, it's pretty sweet. Gets as warm as bath water, but not much you can do about that. My only gripe is that their list of pool rules posted in both English and Spanish says no glass allowed, but nothing about coolers full of cans. Yet this security guard lady kept going around telling people they couldn't have coolers in the pool area. So we'd just move our cooler 15 feet away into the grass and that was fine. But WTF?
The front desk staff at the hotel were fantastic, but the rest of the employees in the hotel (like at the restaurants and such) just didn't seem to care much about their jobs. One example was when I asked the front desk lady for pool towels. She told me she was out but that someone just needed to run to housekeeping to grab a new batch that was ready. She couldn't abandon the desk so she asked one of the random housekeeping guys to go get the towels. He chatted with his buddies in the main lobby for a little bit, went behind the main desk, came out a little bit later, chatted with his buddies some more, and then disappeared. 10 minutes later I gave up waiting and went to the beach with my room's shower towels.
Also beware that the hotel charges $12 a day for self parking.
This place isn't all bad. They give you one free bottle of water per day in the rooms, have a free internet terminal down in the lobby (which is NOT deep frozen or the like, so beware of keyloggers!), and the Casino has a decent number of slots (only 3 tables though). But for the money, unless you're an avid golfer, I would strongly recommend going elsewhere.