My friend and I recently went for a 9 day break in Nassau in the Bahamas. We had booked through Virgin Holidays and the Hotel we chose was the British Colonial. (I have done a separate review for Nassau if anyone is interested.)
Our first sight of the Hotel was impressive. It has the look of all the old colonial hotels such as Raffles in Singapore. On entering there is a great sweeping staircase and very grand furnishings. We immediately thought this was going to be a very special hotel.
Unfortunately it turned out to be special only in that we could not believe there could be so much wrong with a hotel! First of all, as we registered we were given wristbands which acted as keys to our room. Very high tech, we thought! Then the receptionist realised we were having breakfast each day and proceeded to write out, manually, 9 breakfast cards which we had to give to the restaurant each morning. She had to fill in the name, room number and date on 9 separate cards which seemed a rather laborious way to ensure we got our breakfasts! (The line of people waiting behind us also did not appreciate how long this took!)
As we went to our room, we noticed one of the 3 lifts was out of order. This was out of order for our entire stay and one of the other lifts was very temperamental and was out of order for probably 5 out of our 9 days! This resulted in there always being a crowd of people waiting for the lift. We enquired about stairs and were told the stairs all had alarmed fire doors on them and we were not allowed to use them (except in an emergency) as “they’d had guests in the past who got drunk and fell down them”!!!!
Once on the third floor we had trouble opening our door, not because of the high tech wristbands but because it was warped. We ended up having to shoulder it open with some force. Inside the room it was very obvious that the air conditioning had a problem (unless there really was a jet plane taking off each time we turned it on!) Both the door and the air conditioning had a visit every day from a very nice little maintenance man who seemed to work hard on them but the door was only fixed after 6 days and the air conditioning never quietened down enough for us to have it on at night!
Having got the moans out of the way I have to say that the staff were excellent, very friendly, very happy and always willing to help. It seems the Hotel had been renovated twice over the last few years and the latest owners (a Chinese Company) obviously just splashed a bit of paint around. The swimming pool and beach area were beautiful and well maintained and life guards were evident all the time. The Hotel is very near the Cruise Terminal and watching the huge ships pass by the small beach was fascinating. The Restaurants were nice but rather expensive. The name of the Hotel didn’t sit well with me (aren’t we trying to make amends for our Colonial past?) but all the staff we talked to didn’t seem to think it was a problem and they seemed to love the English guests and much prefer us to the Americans. Every Bahamian person we met seemed to be proud to have been (and still was) part of the Commonwealth.
My overall view of the Hotel was that it is like a Grand Old Dame but underneath the rich outerwear it was just a little rundown and shabby.
