Alex & Patty – Yep! we got married!

Sandals Royal Bahamian Review

After 7 days staying at the Sandals Royal Bahamian, I think it would be good to write some review about this resort. (For whoever considering going there as their honeymoon/wedding destination)

It’s always better off to book the resort as a ‘flight and destination’ package through Air Canada vacation or westjet vacation. We got killed by booking them separately because of the US dollar to Canadian dollar exchange rate.

1. Our Room

Sandals Royal Bahamian Manor Luxury Oceanfront Concierge Room

We booked Sandals through their website. We booked the “Honeymoon Royal Village Delux”. For some reason, when we got there, I think our room turn out to be “Manor Luxury Oceanfront Concierge Room”, which has a view of the beach, ocean and sandals’ cay. The bed in the room is a king size bed with 4 posts. The bed is firm and comfortable. The room itself have a fully stocked bar and a mini fridge that they refill it every day.

In-room fully stock bar for all your drinking pleasure!

In-room mini fridge, it has white wine in the fridge, and all those drinks get refilled everyday!

There’s a sitting area where you can have your breakfast (Honeymooner gets ONE complimentary in room breakfast!) and drinks or just simply chill at the room.  The first day when we arrived, the first thing we see is a bottle of champaign and a plate of sweets to congrat us for our honeymoon.

Champagne and sweets for honeymooner!

Review: I personally think the room itself is nice, and overall cleaness is excellent but it deserves renovation to upgrade its look. The room shows it’s age that I can find cracks on the wall, the sinks and  the bath tile. And the bottom of the bathtub has tons of scratches. The faucet is beautiful european style but if I turn the faucet using too much strength, it might fell off.  Because  I am paying a lot of money per night to stay here, I would want to get a room that has a higher standard than what I see.

2. The Food

Royal Cafe's Cracked Conch

There are nine restaurants and a pizzaria at this resort, but they are not ALL 24 hours. That’s why we had abit of hard time finding food when we first arrive there. When we all settled and ready to head out for food, it’s already 4:00pm in the afternoon. There’s no restaurants open at that time except Royal Cafe and Pizzaria. Spices are open till 2pm only, and the rest of the restaurant they don’t open till after 5 or 6pm.  And after 9pm or 10pm most of the restaurants are closed except The Cricketer’s Pub.

The first thing that we had to do is to book Baccarat and Cafe Goombay because those require reservation and you can only dine there once a week!! However, Baccarat also do breakfast, Cafe Goombay also do lunch without reservation.

Rank the restaurants in the resort:

DINNER:

1. Baccarat – excellent food and beautifully presented. Especially the Hors d’ Oeuvres and the Main entree. (soup and salads are so so, so if you want to not get too full from the meal, don’t order those)
2. Crystal Room – excellent food, but the service takes forever to get to us. The food is not as good as Baccarat. lol
3. Casanova – we had our xmas dinner there, they have a anti-pesto area to pick up some appetizers. The food is cooked very nicely and beautifully presented as well.
4. Cafe Goombay - nicely presented food, but not as good as we thought. For some reason, all entree comes with a square block of mac and cheese (yuck!). Alex ordered lamb curry, we thought it would be authentic but turns out to be lambs with gravy sauces, boo. I ordered 2 fish dish, one is fried fish and another one is grilled grouper. The Grill grouper is excellent, the fried fish is okay.
5. Kimono – A Japanese tepanyaki restaurant. The caribean chef prepares the food in front of you. The table sits 10 people. If you are lucky, you get an interactive chef that plays food game with ya. We are not so lucky getting a chef that is not that interactive with the guests at the table.
6. The Cricketer’s pub - I personally think this place has the worst food in the whole 9 restaurants. It’s typical English pub menu, there’s no greens that comes with the dish. Mostly mesh potato and  greasy meats which almost make me gag.

LUNCH:

1. Cafe Goombay – cafe goombay’s lunch menu is mostly consist of seafood and several chicken items. I love their boneless chicken finger and fish wraps. The way they make their batter is excellent!
2. Royal Cafe – We had our first meal there with fried conch, burger and fish sandwich. They are excellent but I don’t like their breads. So when I go there the 2nd or 3rd time, I always order the fish/meat itself without any bread and fries!
3. Spices restaurant – it’s buffet style from morning to lunch. It has a lot of choices from fruits, seafood, vegetable, meats and desserts. I wouldn’t think it’s the best restaurant for lunch but it’s good enough

BREAKFAST

1. Spices restaurant - large seating area makes us not to wait forever to get our seat. Variety of breakfast items for you to choose. Excellent place for breakfast
2. Baccarat – limited seating area and we have to wait forever to get our seat. The food was okay, not perfect.
3. The cricketer’s pub – they open till 5 or 6 am, we didn’t get to see the breakfast menu except they do wrap up some yogurt, fruits and pastry on the bar counter for us to self-serve. There are pots of coffee and hot water for us to self-serve too.

REVIEW: Overall I think the food is excellent. However, I didn’t really like their fruits, salads, soups and some dessert items. I don’t think the fruits and the salads are very fresh and exciting. The fruits are typical item such as orange, banana, apple, grapes, strawberry, catalope, honeydew and pineapple. I can tell all those fruits are imported because they don’t seem that fresh to me or it was different than the ones I had in Toronto. The salads are always either roman salads or iceberg salads. There’s no baby spinach, bean sprouts, or more variety of salad ingredients. The salads between restaurants are very similar.

The soups and dessert between restaurants are very similar too. Seems like they are using the similar recipe through out the whole resort. I think the worst one is the bread. They don’t seem that freshly baked no matter which restaurant I go. So I only order the actual “meat” of the menu item, i avoid ordering anything that has bread that comes with it. The dessert has a lot of variety, some are very good and some are not. For cake wise, too much icing or cream on top of it. The cheesecake is good except I don’t understand why there’s no crust at the bottom.  The cookies taste stale.

3. The Resort

Sandals Royal Bahamian Pool Area

Beach area with the view of boat loading area

Swim up bar

Ocean view whirlpool

The resort has 2 major pools, both of them has a swim up bar. The only thing that I didn’t like those pools because they are just as cold as the sea water. I can tell why people rather sun tan than going into the cold pool. There are several whirlpools as well. This resort is ‘couple’ only. I think it’s perfect because there will be no kids running around, or crying. It’s perfect adult resort. The resort has several pool tables, two tennis courts, three chess tables and one ping pong table (where Alex and I master our ping pong skill).

The resort also owns another offshore private island called “Sandal’s cay”. That’s where Cafe Goombay and their famous Red Lane spa are located. You need to take a shuttle boat to get there.

Sandals' cay- view from the loading dock

Path to Red Lane Spa

Sandals cay beach

Sandals cay bar and pool

The cay has two sides of beach, there’s front side towards the boat loading area, and there’s a back side of the island that we can access to. The island is relaxing and beautiful. I find the water here is even nicer than the main land. The only thing we didn’t do at the Sandals’s cay is to have Red Lane Spa. Everyone who had the spa loves it!

The resort also has different events everyday. Everyday, they will provide you a sheet of activities and events happening the following day. You won’t get bored at night because there are always something to do.

Review: The resort is definitely relaxing, fun and comfortable. I love it! However, watch out for the sandflies on Sandal’s cay. I got bitten when I went to Sandal’s cay for dinner. I didn’t notice the bite till after the dinner and then it start to itch 2 days later. It took me 2 weeks to recover, and it was the most unbearable itch~!! So bring some bug spray when you go to Sandal’s cay.

4. Watersports

Alex and I underwater

Lion Fish!

The resort provides all sorts of watersports such as scuba diving, snorkeling, kayaking, windsurfing, sailboating..etc. (see the list of their activities here)

The main purpose that we came to Bahamas is to either Scuba Diving or Snorkeling. We originally just want to take the discover scuba diving and just dive once a day.  Discover dive is $70 and you pay it once to learn how to do basic scuba diving without studying or writing any actual Scuba diving exam. We later found out that if you only have the resort certificate you will be put on the standby list for scuba diving because they will take those people who have certificate first.

Therefore, we gave it a 2nd thought, and we end up taking the full Open Water Certification. Because for Discover scuba dive. It takes two morning. One for the basic scuba diving learning in a pool. Second morning for actual scuba diving in the ocean. All we need for the full open water certificate is to have at least 4 more dives and demonstrate the required skills. The full OW certification costs $400 US. They can give us the $70 discount that we paid for our Discover resort certificate. So we end up taking the full license. It lasts a lifetime, so why not?

The instructor “Santiba” who taught us scuba diving, he’s very patient and thorough. We learned so much just to scuba dive for 5 times. It’s definitely a pleasant experience no matter from the learning or the diving.

The only thing we didn’t do is the snorkeling. Snorkeling trip gets canceled all the time. They won’t do the trip if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

REVIEW: Our first two days of the trip was rainy and windy. So we missed out a lot of opportunity to do any watersports if the weather gets bad. The rest of the days of our trip was sunny and nice weather. We are happy with the watersports that we did. The staff at the watersports centre in the resort are patient and friendly.

oh, and how did we take our underwater shots? I have a Canon SD600 point-and-shoot camera. I bought a waterproof case. Here’s the WP-DC4 water proof case  on Amazon.com.  The price of the case cost the same as the camera, but it’s totally worth it!

5. Service

There’s no doubt of the service when you pay so much for it. The service of the resort is excellent. Every staff always say hi to you no matter who you are. They are very cheerful 24/7. They are also very patient and helpful when you got lost in the resort. I would say their customer service is 5 out of 5.

The best part is the towels in the resort that you can take it, use it, leave it on the chair and then go get a new one. I don’t have to worry about using my own beach towels and waiting it to dry.  The only problem is that in the middle of the day, everyone took all the dried towels and if you are not a early riser, they will be gone. You will have to wait for a while in order to see the dried and clean ones to show up.

Overall Review:

The resort is excellent, and especially and ONLY for couples. Everyone are adults over there and playing like kids. I think for the money we spent for the whole trip. We’d give it a 4 out of 5. I would visit Sandals again, but I’d try a cheaper option such as Jamaica next time. And if you are visiting Bahamas just for vacation, and just want a nice and comfortable place to stay, then try either Riu or Sheraton.

Bahamas the island itself is great. Beautiful water and nice temperature. (It feels like September temperature when we were there, so we still need to have jackets). The only thing that is lacking is a strong Bahamian culture. The whole resort feels very “American”. The food is great but lacking a strong touch of Bahamian flavor. When we go out of the resort to go visit Nassau downtown, the place is full of American tourist. The shops and restaurants are mostly American restaurants. I was disappointed to see that Bahamas have been taken over by American company…or Canadian banks. (There are tons of RBC banks and ScotiaBanks on the island!)

Overall I had a fun time at the Bahamas. I am just sad now to come back to see the snow in Toronto. *sign*

Tags: Bahamas, honeymoon, Sandals, Sandals Royal Bahamian

03.Jan.09 honeymoon, travel Comment (1)