I found their services were limited and under conditions, some conditions were untold and unwritten.
Resort’s rules were relatively highly detailed i.e. (1) leftover breakfast will be charged 100 THB per 100 g, (2) food taken out of breakfast area will cost 200 THB per 100 g, (3) dress code during breakfast (weird, considering that you are on your beach holiday not academic conference) etc.
For me, these highly (told and untold) conditional services made unnecessarily unrelaxed and unbreathable atmosphere.
The examples of the untold/unwritten/unclear conditional services are (1) in-villa breakfast needs to be ordered 1 day in advance, (2) romantic dinner needs to be ordered 1 day in advance (although another staff said ‘3 hours in advance’, another one said ‘depends on weather’ and another one said ‘cannot be served in room’ and another one said ‘can be served in room’).
The hotel is full of trainees, inexperienced, untrained staffs. These kind of staffs can be seen as unintentionally unhelpful. They see the whole business through the eyes of ‘trainee’. They would lecture you about the resort rules just like how they had been lectured. A few untrained waiters coughed while standing behind my head/back. Sometimes you needed to speak to 5 trainees and received various different answers before getting 1 simple problem fixed. I felt more like I was ‘teaching them’ rather than ‘had been serviced by them’.
The intentionally unhelpful staffs were minority but interesting. This intentionally unhelpful staffs can help, but choose not to and even stop other staffs to do so. The food and beverage division was the case. After several occasions, we stopped hoping for unexpected hospitality/generosity, we only hoped to receive the service they promised.
In more specific details;
On my first breakfast I found the air condition (AC) in the buffet venue was leaking dirty water into the food, plates and cutlery, guests etc. To me, this is serious as it can contaminate food and cause consequential health problems at the cost of the guests.
We brought the issue to the manager, however, he replied ‘as you can see, everything is under operation now. People are having their breakfasts and I just can’t stop the whole thing to fix the problematic AC’.
Yet, the dirty water had been leaking for the next consecutive days throughout our stay and we avoided food served under that particular AC.
I got diarrhea and felt very dizzy on my 3rd morning during breakfast. We all (4 of us) didn’t have much breakfast because of my sickness. We decided to come back to the room for me to use toilet and rest. I wasn’t too worried about kids not eating enough because I knew we had our privilege in-villa breakfast service that we could order anytime from 7-10am. After I rested and felt better, I phoned the breakfast restaurant attempting to ask for coconuts (good for diarrhea) and bread basket for kids. The answer was ‘no’. The reason was my breakfast was already consumed, so, it’s done.
At this point, we still hoped that we could take the service from this division as it is. I then decided to extend 2 extra nights on our pool villa suite at the cost of 13,000++ THB a night. We decided to stay because of the resort’s landscape, and the cleanliness of the accommodation.
However, my last straw was when we tried to order ‘in-room breakfast’ on our 5th morning (raining heavily, more difficult with young kids), and were informed that it was impossible because we must reserve that one day in advance, while this rule has never been told and/or written anywhere.
In their breakfast order papers (laid on desk in the villa, please see picture), it’s only said ‘please clearly indicate the meal items for your breakfast. We are happy to serve you as much as you can eat, but any leftover food will be charged at THB100/100 g’.
There’s no information about having to ‘order one-day in advance’ written anywhere.
When I explained this to a Thai staff at the breakfast restaurant, she understood my situation from my point of view and told me that they would try their best to serve the breakfast (thank you guys).
However, around 5 mins later, I got a phone call from the same Thai staff saying that they can’t do it anymore, because their manager told them not to.
I think this became too unfair because: (1) I did not know about their untold rule (2) it was raining and difficult for us (3) the breakfast restaurant could fix this but they chose not to (4) I paid for the service at the cost of THB 13,000++, but did not receive the service
I talked to Tom, the front office manager who doesn’t seem to have any authority over anyone or anything, about my problem. The answers were as expected; (1) No, he can’t intervene this (2) No, he doesn’t have an authority to do that (3) Yes, he understands me but sorry can’t help.
We decided to leave the resort immediately which was a shame…. as the resort’s landscape is really distinctively beautiful.…