This place has so much potential.. unfortunately our stay here was a lowlight of our vacation.
Starting from the good things: the location of the hotel is great!! The rooms are sizable, fit our family of 4 comfortably. The pool and the cafe on sites were both great. They provide beach tickets to mambo beach which we went to almost everyday.
Now the not so great things:
* The rooms, at least those in the blue building, desperately need an update. The sofa was full of stains, the shelf has strips of veneers coming off at the bottom, the mattress squeaks with every little movement, the kitchen pans are all scratched (why would they only provide metal spatulas???).
* The hotel has reduced service compared to others. For example they only do a light cleaning every other day, and a deep cleaning every 4th day. The front desk only opens from 7am to 7pm. During our stay we had a couple of situations where we had to cut our day short to make it back to the hotel by 7pm to catch the front desk.
* While most of the staff members are friendly and tried to be helpful, we had very unpleasant interactions with one of the front desk staff. (I am not sure whether he is perhaps even the owner of the hotel as he refers to the property as "my hotel".)
When we checked into our room, my husband immediately noted that it smelled like smoke. I thought the smell was faint and probably not a big problem, so we stayed in the assigned room. However after the first night's sleep, our 11-month old had a baby asthma flare up and we had to take him to the emergency room in the Curacao Medical Center in the morning.
While my husband was with the baby in the ER, I went to the front desk, recounted the events and asked whether it would be possible to change a room. The man at the front desk just stared back at me in blankness. He then said he would come check out our room with me. As soon as we entered I could smell the faint smoke again, but the guy just looked around for a few seconds and told me in an absolute tone that he smelled nothing. I was shocked by the attitude. Then we returned to the front desk and he told me coldly that all rooms are booked and when I persisted to ask if there is anything that can be done he literally shovelled his computer screen towards my direction and said "you can see for yourself, there is no available room in my hotel".
We have traveled around the world and I had not encountered this level of arrogance in hotel staff. I understand that changing rooms is not always possible, but the man did not even try to help me in any way. He could have offered to deep clean the apartment or change out all the bedding instead. He literally just ignored my request, wrote off all my concerns mockingly, and didn't try to help. There was zero empathy for our situation, not even "I'm sorry that your baby is unwell" or "is there anything we can do to help get medical care on the island". He simply didn't care. I felt deeply disrespected.
Unfortunately our baby had to go to ER again a few days later as the breathing issue persisted. I was so nervous every evening we had to put him to sleep in our room. I came across the staff several times in the hotel during our stay and he didn't bother talking to me or asking how the baby was doing. On our last night my husband and i came across the guy again with another staff at the front desk. We told the other staff that our baby had to go to the ER twice and couldn't go swimming the whole time, and she was immediately trying to help. But the guy insisted that because *he* couldn't smell anything in our room, it was not his job to help in any way.
This is possibly the worst experience I have had with a hotel staff. The willingness to help travelers in need should be the first criteria for anyone in this job position. It's a pity that our impressions of the hotel had to be clouded by incidents like this.
