I am always hesitant to give my opinion when it is negative in nature, but I feel when it comes to travel, that honesty is the best policy. My husband and I had the unfortunate pleasure of staying here 2 summers ago. Due to the fact that we joined what was not supposed to be a vacation club, we were stuck at this resort, when we were originally promised a Disney resort. This hotel claims that it is a five star "resort" when in fact it is nothing more than a budget timeshare property. If you already know this, and are fine with it, then great - but we were lied to by the hotel and the vacation club (we have since received our money back from vacation club and Choice hotels which is the parent company of this hotel). Here were our problems:
1. The location is bad - right on corner of 192 highway - there was tons of construction. The property itself had many security issues: locked access when there shouldn't have been, broken security lights, etc... There is virtually nothing within walking distance except a budget hotel next door, and a family restaurant (which was quite good actually).
2. We were misled about restaurant on property (there is no restaurant, but a small cafe - my kitchen is bigger than it, and it was closed for most of the week that we were there).
3. There was a small pool in our complex, but to get to the bigger pool, we had to walk across a congested highway because the complex is spread out.
4. We were told by hotel that we could rent cars on property (no!) or use shuttle service on property. The shuttle service only ran during certain hours, and so we were stuck several times at the hotel without a rental car, so our only choice was to pay extremely high cab fees because most shuttles would not come to the hotel complex after 6:00 p.m - even though hotel said they would!
5. Housekeeping worked all night right outside our room (I don't know on what since we had no daily maid service at all). They left garbage in front of our door several mornings in a row - really nice to look at in the middle of July! They turned on the sprinkler system three nights in a row at 3:00 a.m. and it hit our windows each night - needless to say, we were very tired.
6. Staff was absolutely rude and ignorant - right from the manager to the timeshare sharks. The timeshare people were the worst as they pretended that they were from customer service department in order to resolve our complaints. They were not - they only wanted us to take a tour of the complex!
On a positive note, the room was quite large (although several things were broken) and tastefully decorated. Despite our problems, this does not mean that these things will happen to you. There are several other threads on this board about which hotels to avoid, and this one comes up quite often. The property looks nice in the brochure (don't they all!), but it is quite misleading. We had to pay $500.00 US for 7 nights, plus a second fee to the vacation club. Once we added up the shuttle service, we spent lots more than if we would have stayed at Disney - but as I stated, we had no choice.
I wish you good luck. I must warn you that if you do have any problems, don't expect much from the hotel. I am known as a consumer advocate to my family and friends, and it took me 6 months to get our concerns resolved in an equitable way - although I was able to get the president of the company to contact me and apologize!
I hope that you have a better stay then we did. If you prepare yourself, you will be able to deal with any problems that you may have. Just be aware that when you call the hotel (as I did many times) they will embellish or mislead you in regards to the questions that you are asking - we, as well as the vacation club found a great lack of inconsistency and disorganization with this hotel.
Good luck. My review is not to scare you, but just to let you know from one customer to another, what our experience was at this hotel.
Tiger
