My wife and I stayed at this hotel for a weekend t...

My wife and I stayed at this hotel for a weekend to celebrate our 2-year anniversary. It was the worst experience I ve had among hundreds of hotels I ve stayed at in Australia and overseas.

1. The room was not as advertised. The entertainment system was advertised to include TVs with premium channels AND pay per view films in the room type we booked. When we arrived we found out that the condo room we were placed in did not only fail to provide this, but had some of the most outdated television systems I ve seen (including a VCR). One of the two TVs did not even work - displaying a static image when turned on. The other TV had a picture display with such a bad quality that rendered it unwatchable.

2. We asked to be moved to a new room which ended up being a downgrade. Our bags were supposedly invisible to the staff who were meant to move the bags between rooms during the downgrade. I was interrupted twice while trying to enjoy time by the pool with my wife, by staff telling me they could not see my bags. Finally, I went up to point out the bags and sort out the issue myself.

3. We consistently received bad treatment from rude and incompetent staff, especially during our pool bar experience. We willingly paid $299 for a cabana package because we were there to enjoy ourselves. The package allows us to sit on a cabana mattress by the pool and have lunch. Little did we know that we would be waiting 2 hours for our food to arrive. We watched other people who came 1-1.5hours after us get their food and eat it before we even got our food. Upon inquiring with staff at the pool, I was told that they were still learning and were overwhelmed . I followed up on my food 5+ times before physically having to walk inside and call the manager to launch an investigation into the issue. As it turned out, we were finally told that the order was lost.

4. Finally, and probably equally insulting, was our experience regarding late check outs. On Saturday night, we requested a late checkout from reception staff on night shift - she extended the check out till 1pm. She also mentioned that there may be possibility to extend this further, free of charge, if the room wasn t needed. She advised us to check with reception the next day. The next day after breakfast, we checked with staff at reception and she extended our stay until 3pm (free of charge) so that we could experience the pool facility further before leaving at 5pm for our flight. When we came to check out at 3pm, there was a different staff member at reception, who had a terrible attitude and insisted that we owed the hotel $200 for the two hours over 1pm. I patiently recounted the events to him and he very clearly expressed that he wanted to charge the $200. We requested to speak to the prior staff member so that she could verify the story and he advised us she wasn t there insisting that we pay the $200. We again patiently explained that we did not owe $200. He then went to the back to check and returned saying that he would hold the charge . We of course objected to this ominous reply, explaining that there is no charge to hold. He explicitly stated that dealing with this matter would take him two hours. I requested to speak to the manager as we felt we had been lied to. He adamantly objected saying he had just spoken to the manager. We again asked to speak to the manager. When we AGAIN explained the situation to the manager, she then called the previous staff member (in a call that took less than 3 minutes), and was told that the series of events I had recounted was in fact correct. Finally the $200 charge was removed.

When paying for something presenting itself as a premium luxury certified five star service, you expect to be treated with some form of dignity. This was the opposite of what we experienced. We found ourselves FIGHTING our way through the weekend. I would actively discourage anyone from staying at this hotel.