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Review of Sonesta Resorts - St. Maarten

After reading the reviews I was a bit apprehensive...

After reading the reviews I was a bit apprehensive to book rooms with them. But after being there I can happily say that things have changed for sure as management changed whilst we were there. The lethargic people especially the guy at the pool bar was thrown as he was used to serving customers who gave him generous tips and was rude. The feedback is not biased & personal at all. Below is the list

1. There are 4 restaurants instead of 5 mentioned on their website. 2 restaurants Jings & Ascot pub respectively are located outside the property and are open only on few days. Wasn t able to book Ascot . The food and the chef Sejpal at Jings are the winner. The servers at Palm grill are lazy & especially one of them took ages to serve us food for lunch. The barbecue on the beach at palm grill restaurant just happened once a week during our stay. So don t recommend it. The pizzeria is a part of Ocean terrace buffet style restaurant thus making it 4 restaurants. The ocean terrace is the best which serves buffet & all the servers go out of their way to serve you & make sure the guests are looked after well. All 3 guys at the live pasta counter made the best pasta. Ocean terrace can run out of food if you get there late but they did refill them but took a while to refill them. The variety of items for buffet style was very limited & was same for all the days, lunches & dinners too. More variety of food needs to be added as same menu for lunch & dinner on all days can get boring & repetitive.
2. The casino is really small. The casino is located at the corner of the main building lobby next to reception.
3. There s no kids water park as mentioned but have just 2 water slides going into the main pool. The pool doesn t have lifeguards. There s only 1 pool for the whole resort and is not that big.
4. The entertainment team of Lauren Morgan UK was the best in the whole resort especially Yuliana, Daniel and others. Yuliana went out for her way to do face painting for my daughter.
5. The beach club for Younger kids is well maintained & is lovely. The staff was lazy & not attentive. My daughter walked out of the club & they didn t realise too as they were busy doing their other work. Luckily we saw our daughter coming out but it could have been risky with kids walking out without their knowledge. There was only 1 girl who looked after them. Parents were sat inside whilst they watched their kids playing which shouldn t be allowed for the safety of all kids.
6. The rooms had maintenance issues especially the ones facing backside. The premier island view didn t have any view at all.The premier ocean/ pool view was really good.
7. The bell boys are really good and helpful.
8. The location of hotel on the Maho beach is the best with amazing views from ocean terrace.
9. It would have been nice to have a shuttle service from airport to hotel then having to pay extra for taxi when it s an all inclusive resort.
10. Housekeeping staff needs to work. Requested to clean our room several time & took them several phone calls and hours to get to clean our rooms. The ladies took 30 mins to clean the room only to find out that they only made bed and mopped the bathroom floor. The rest of the floor had lot of sand & wasn t cleaned, nor was the bathroom floor cleaned properly. She didn t clean the toilet pot and sink too. To our shock she cleaned the toilet seat with the toilet brush which was used to clean the toilet pots for all the rooms & she wiped it with one of the hand towels. I really felt gross to use hand towel later after I saw how they cleaned the room. The rooms had 4 bathing towels whilst she only left 3 towels. Laundry bags not provided in the room. The mugs in the room didn t have spoons.

The staff is working hard to bring its standard back and some of them are really nice and going out of their way genuinely to help you. Overall it was a really nice stay and thus would give it a 4 star but they need to fix few things for the price you pay for all inclusive resort hotel.