St Lucia, Sandals Regency Golf Resort and Spa Review

Overall Rating

When I asked my wife to marry me one of the things we agreed was that our honeymoon should be spent at a sandals resort, we wanted pure luxury, good food and a lively atmosphere, but not too lively if you get my drift.

We decided to use BWIA as they flew out of Heathrow on a Sunday and BA/Virgin only flew from Gatwick. This was a big mistake; I have now found out that BWIA has a reputation for delays and poor customer service.

Our outbound flight was due to take 8 hrs to St Lucia, not content with delaying us for three hours at Heathrow with no one telling us what the problems were, the plane was redirected to Trinidad where we disembarked and sat in the terminal. By the time we reached the resort we where a wopping 9 hours late, it had taken 22 hours from check in at Heathrow to reach the Sandals Resort. We received an apology letter from Thomson's about this and they gave us BWIA contact address. Boy will BWIA get a stroppy letter from us, not a good start to the honeymoon.

Now to the sandals resort it took us a good few days to get into the swing of things but one thing that I noticed immediately about the resort was that all the staff was extremely friendly to the point they would always say hello, how are you etc. You could see that many of the staff indeed where genuine. The levels of customer care/service where amazing, everything was "no problem", they would bend over backwards to make sure that you where looked after, right from the bar staff to the managers in reception.

All the drinks including champagne where inclusive of the costs as where water sports. There are 6 restaurants and our favourite was the Italian "Armando's" that did an excellent buffet breakfast, you really could eat for England on this resort. Whilst Armando's was a great place, I think the emphasis in terms of food at sandals is more on quantity than quality. There are two a la carte restaurants that need to be pre booked, they are La Toc (French) and Kimonos (Japanese), in La Toc they are a bit cheeky in that they have a pay wine and champagne menu, if you want a bottle of Bollinger it will set you back $75, so much for ultra all inclusive as sandals put it. That's not the only example of where you will add to the cost of your holiday, but I will go into more detail later. To summarise the food I would say it was good but not exceptional as we expected for the thousands paid for the honeymoon. We had our wedding breakfast at Brockett Hall herts and the chefs there have been accredited Michelin stars, so I guess anything after that would be downhill.

Now to the room, we booked a deluxe hillside room which sounds good but is in fact the lowest grade of room at sandals. Still having booked a 5 star hotel we still expected a plush clean room.

The night before we went to St Lucia we stayed in the Crowne Plaza at Heathrow which was a standard comfortable 4 star, I would say our room at Sandals wasn't even up to this standard, the bathroom looked dated, seals on the bath had been poorly finished, the air conditioning unit made a rattling noise all night (you need the air conditioning on its very warm even at night).

There was a mosquito that took a liking to us that we nicknamed "Fred the mosquito"; my partner was so badly bitten that she needed to see the on site nurse who was fantastic, she even arranged for our room to be fumigated and Fred alas was no more.

Now I must be careful what I say here, whilst the staff where exceptional most of the guests that stay in the Sandals resorts are American. I always had the illusion that they considered us the Brits as their cousins, how wrong could I be on this holiday, If you didn't talk in an American accent you didn't exist on this holiday regardless of how friendly or sociable you are. When I and my wife go on holiday, we love to meet new people, it just makes the holiday a bit more special and we have indeed got friends from previous holidays. But Sandals was just devoid of any atmosphere, even if you where American it didn't seem that much fun.

Now going back to the all inclusive thing, we had a bill of approx $400 when we left sandals after two weeks on top of £5000 for the holiday. We paid $10 for each 30 minute session of internet access, we paid $80 for two rounds of golf that where supposed to be included in the package, toiletries where hideously expensive and we spent nearly $200 on a day trip to soufriere by catamaran, which was by far the best day on the holiday as we encountered some friendly Brits on the boat. Ultra all inclusive is just a tad over the top and I nearly forgot if you want a couple's massage in the spa it costs at least $150 plus 15% service charge.

In summary we loved the staff, the resort was very well looked after, the room was poor, the food was average to good. The other guests weren't very friendly in the main and would I spend this sort of money on a sandals holiday again, probably not.