Stayed 2 weeks with our large family group (9 adults, 4 kids). Overall impressions:
+ Small staff:guest ratio. G.Os and employees are friendly and make an effort to remember your name and preferences. Special shoutout to chef de village Daniel, who is personable and readily available; Manon and her high-energy fitness classes; Vikash and his attentive bar service.
+ Beautiful grounds. Lots of flowers and chirping birds. Magnificent views from the NW-facing infinity “zen” pool. Get a room near the zen pool if you plan to hang here (cleaner, calmer, and prettier than the other pool, but no kids allowed). Also convenient if you want to get late breakfast, lunch or dinner at Le Phare, the seated restaurant. Main beach is spacious with calm water. Doesn’t require beach shoes, but don’t expect super fine sand.
+- Spacious rooms. Large beds, but they’re two smaller ones pushed together so they dip in the middle. Thin, hard mattress. Lots of pillows, but thin and lumpy. I woke up sore every morning.
+- Rooms cleaned twice daily, plus turn down service, but they never restocked the mini-bar and the cans/bottles in the fridge were filthy. Common areas constantly being cleaned. Spotted several large roaches in reception and near the beach, small roaches in our room, and a roach climbing on the crackers and cheese in la Distillerie, the buffet restaurant. Alouda bar smells like rotting fruit.
- Although there are lots of food options and the chefs create decent (sometimes good) flavors, the quality of the products is abysmal. Breakfast “sausages” are microwaveable hotdogs. Mussels were grey and off smelling. Shrimp had that chewiness and pale color of something that’s been frozen. Ignore when they hype lobster. Lobster fishing is illegal in Mauritius (farming is allowed). Almost all is imported and frozen, which is how it tasted. Bread is stale. Red wine is drinkable, but white and rosé are harsh.
- Questionable food hygiene at the buffet. Saw a guest take a communal serving spoon for one of the sauces, put it fully in her mouth to taste, and but it back. Another guest used serving tongs to pick something up off the high-traffic floor, then put them back in the broccoli.
- Reception called a taxi for us. Taxi tried to scam us. When we told security, they seemed unconcerned. Daniel said he would look into it.
- Club Med organized a 4-hour boat ride for 12 of us. Included seeing dolphins, lunch on Île Benetiers, and a 30-minute van transfer each way. Paid 1000€. Boat was uncomfortable. Seat cushions dirty, ripped, and some missing. We were not given life vests. When we insisted on vests for the three children ages 3-5, one was broken and they didn’t have backups. There were not enough on the boat for all the adults. The island is covered in trash and vendors selling cheap souvenirs. Water is so polluted it’s no longer clear. Pollution foam on top and it stinks of petrol. Your skin turns black from the dirty sand. Lunch was frozen fish and lobster, cold pasta, shredded lettuce with tomatoes, hot dogs (“sausages”), and grilled bananas. All was packed by Club Med in a cardboard box that sat on the boat in the sun. Everything was undercooked. We asked the captain to cook it more, he refused (or rather, said he would, then we watched him absolutely not). We all ate the cold pasta and that was it. Our boat went faster than any others around and almost hit another boat. Went super close to the dolphins, often cutting off their path, a practice that is known to be unsafe for dolphins. Captain said for these excursions he’s paid 125€ PER MONTH.
- There is zero consistency in info. A few examples: Reception and the app say le Phare breakfast ends at 11:30. But it actually ends 11:15, or at least that’s what we were told at the restaurant twice. We made a dinner reservation at reception and they said 9 PM was the earliest they could take us. We swung by the restaurant just after and they said we were welcome at 8. Had room service and called to have the trays cleaned up at 10 PM, no problem. Did the same the following day and were told room service doesn’t work that late. Etc etc.
+- Golf carts are readily available to take you around the resort. Paths are too narrow, so pedestrians have to step into the dirt when carts come around. There are a number of blind turns. Was on a cart going quickly that almost hit a young kid.
+- Liberal late checkout policy that let us theoretically checkout at 4:30 PM, one hour before we needed to leave the resort. We confirmed late checkout the evening before our departure and morning of. But at 9:55 AM, we were told they’d had an internal communication error and 3 of our 5 rooms needed to be empty by 10 AM.
+- Pretty lily pond that serves as water waste treatment. Buffet seems wasteful, though they have signage claiming otherwise. Bartenders use single-use sugar packets when making drinks. Single-use jam and Nutella packages served at breakfast, single-use mayo at lunch, etc.
- Unreliable and often not working WiFi. Doesn’t seem to be an island-wide problem, as we had good WiFi almost everywhere else we went.
