Royalton Resorts

The staff at the new royalton vessence in Barbados were extremely kind and tried to make the experience good, HOWEVER, we felt like it was important to warn others not to stay here if they’re expecting a 5 star experience. This resort is new and not ready to open. Most of the food options are unavailable and the staff is inexperienced. Most dinners (and snacks if you could find them) were scant and incorrect once delivered. The staff at the resort are not able to make any decisions, common sense or otherwise, and are required to call headquarters to answer simple questions. They were unable to arrange airport transport when requested the day before, they do not have boating activities yet nor the ability to arrange them, at check in they attempted to charge us $7,000 extra dollars for our 14 year old because their website incorrectly booked her age as a child instead of an adult. We settled on $2000 extra but they were not able to use their computer system to make the fix and we had to pull it up on the website ourselves to fix the mistake. The resort seems to be at about 5-10% of capacity and yet that seemed to be challenging. 2 hour + for room service, inability to answer questions or communicate internally. At check out, it took security 2+ hours and multiple requests to bring us some lost shorts and sunglasses. In fact, we still don’t have them and are waiting for our taxi that we had to arrange ourselves for the airport. We requested a late check out of one hour, and they were unable to accommodate the request despite no guests at the resort. They started calling our room and knocking on our door at one minute til check out. We were ready, thank goodness, but are now sitting and waiting. I hope you like Marlin, because that was the “catch of the day” at every restaurant, for every meal and the even when the menu descriptions mentioned another fish (tuna), marlin was substituted. The beach staff, the bartenders, the wait staff, and Sade, in particular were wonderful, but the resort management needs to let the staff on sight have some autonomy and authority to properly take care of their guests. Bottom line, they are not ready for guests, and management needs to be on-sight and more guest oriented. The hotel is new and nice, but the rooms, food, and guest services were 3 star at best. Don’t waste your money here. There are much better places for half the price in Barbados. Side note: it was $38 US dollars for copper tone sport sunscreen and $25 for a box of tampons… I get the upcharge but that seems like price gouging to an extreme.

This app has major flaws: 1. It does not keep you signed in. You need to constantly re-login every session 2. It always opens on the resort selection screen (because of issue #1) but tapping your resort 75% of the time leads to it opening another page then immediately going back to the resort selection screen. Extremely frustrating. 3. When you try to login, about 50% of the time you get an error screen. The only recourse is to restart the app and pray it works next time