David Conran

Review of Club Med Resort, Bintan Island

Club Med Bintan Island is a bit of an oddity.

Club Med Bintan Island is a bit of an oddity.
The location is great. The beach is secluded and good, but not fantastic. The in-resort activities are good but there are timing/availability issues, and some quite odd-ball ones too. e.g. Circus stuff.
The food was hit-and-miss. The restaurant(s) suffer from trying to be too fancy and offering too much choice & variety. It's understandable given the wide range of nationalities that visit the place, but if they scaled back the attempted fanciness and went back to plainer basics, it would be better. e.g. Desserts trying to have too many flavours at once. Sometimes simpler/more classic is better.
That said, some meals/options they offered were truly fantastic, this offset some of the more "Meh!" or too weird combinations/creations.
The main dinning area offers: basic Italian, a hot meat dish (e.g. roasts etc), Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Indian, Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Desserts, and Ice Cream stations/areas.
Their a la carte restaurant (The Terrace) was good food but too limited in options. i.e. A choice from two options per course or 4 courses.

The bars were also a bit hit-and-miss. Some served strong drinks (the main bar) while the others seemed very watery. Some of their more unusual cocktails were great, and some of more standard ones were very ho-hum. e.g. How earth do you repeatedly make bad/poor Pina Coladas at a beach resort?! Coffee was also a tragedy until we discovered the self-serve limited-time Nespresso offering near the main bar. Until then, we used our own coffee we brought in.

The rooms are a bit dated but totally fine, especially as you won't be in them much. The beds are a bit hard but acceptable. The A/C was great. The room we were in was quite but a bit of a hike from the main area.

The staff on the other hand are absolutely top-notch, and super friendly. Perhaps over-friendly at times. They remember what you like and want, and go out of their way to may your stay pleasant and as perfect as possible.

As it is an all-included style resort I found the up-sell pushing for them to make more money a bit off putting. It's blatant but completely avoidable and ignore-able. It'd be nicer if it was more discrete.

My wife took advantage of the Spa services (additional costs obviously) and loved it. Note: They offer specials/packages, take advantage of them, otherwise it's quite costly.

We spent a week there in May 2019, and enjoyed it. Yes, we'd go again. I'd recommend the place if you don't have to travel too far or haven't been to many other beach resorts. If it was closer, we'd visit it more often/again. If you have to travel a long long way, there are probably better value options for you closer to home. However, being local to Singapore make it fairly easy to get to from almost anywhere in the world.
We didn't have kids with us, so I can't speak for the child services but parents seemed happy from what I could see.