Jamie Fitzpatrick

Review of Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort ...

Save yourself and your money and stay somewhere el...

Save yourself and your money and stay somewhere else
I don't even know how to start here, except to say that by reading all of the reviews of people that say this is the best place ever, they are very obviously NOT luxury hotel travelers by any means. We have stayed in a lot of luxury hotels in a lot of different places and this doesn't qualify by any means, they are stealing your money with that title.

We were set up to stay here for 4 nights by our travel agent. Telling us that it is the best of the best. At first the location seems perfect and you are excited for all the adventures, but soon find out, it's all a charade. Starting with lunch on the afternoon of our arrival. The service was terrible, our waitress barely spoke English, forgot about us and we felt abandoned. Not a good way to start.

Getting to our room, although they are spacious and probably used to be really nice when this place was built, they feel like they need updating and our room was dirty to the point that I really didn't want to stay there, because I was worried about what we were sleeping on. The windows were so dirty that you were looking through a haze, our bathroom was dirty and the topper was when I opened a drawer under the coffee maker to look for coffee cups, there was a bunch of paper wrappers, a dirty cup inside the drawer with a used tea bag in the cup and a dirty spoon in the cup as well. Left it for them to clean the next day, didn't touch it. So the next day when we left the room before they cleaned, we left the drawer open for them so they couldn't miss it. We came back and knew our room had been cleaned, so we opened the drawer and the cup and trash was still in there. They closed the drawer and ignored it. Because of this, we didn't use the pool in our room the entire time we were there, because I figured it was unhygienic.

The food was ok at lunch if you could manage the poor service, but at dinner, it was a complete joke. Not only was the service comical at best, the food was embarrassingly bad. They try to pull off 5 star dining and it really is a joke. There is nothing, 5, 4 or even 3 stars about it. It takes you over 2 1/2 hours to eat just an entree and skip dessert. There is no variety and you are forced to eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day. We were told that the wait staff were mostly back packers passing through (told this by staff) and it shows. Most barely speak coherent English and definitely have never been in a 5 star restaurant, let alone know how to serve in one. If they were just true to what they have to work with and threw some BBQ grills on the deck and did the country BBQ thing, they would be so much better off. The 5 star thing was painful and you almost felt sorry for the place and people for how out of touch and clueless they were.

The resort itself had a lot of kangaroos on it, and that was definitely the highlight, being able to see so many in their natural habitat. But, we are from Colorado and the mountains and there was nothing real about this place. The trails were manufactured roads and it was just all fake. It never felt like you were in the middle of the mountains as it should. It felt that you were in a fake set up that is pretending to be something that it is not.

4 nights there was way to long, we found ourselves wanting to leave on the first day and we were very bored during our stay here. We rode the mountain bikes and walked all of the trails and it is just the same scenery, and although pretty, it isn't anything that leaves you thinking that you could do this for 4 days. Wolgan Valley would be nice to visit for a day, but there is nothing here to warrant an overnight stay, even if your main goal is to relax. Take your money elsewhere and relax in clean style. It's hard to relax when you don't know if they have even washed your sheets or not.

We would not recommend staying here and it was definitely the low light of our time in Australia. The price point of this hotel is stupid for what you get.