The hotel itself is in a lovely position – literally right on the beach and as far as I could tell, all the rooms had sea views as promised – perfect for watching the wonderful sunsets! The pool was nice although I think it might be due a really good clean as the pool walls were leaving black marks on peoples swimming costumes. There were plenty of sunbeds, but, and its a big BUT, there were nowhere near enough parasols to go round so unless you got to the beach or pool early, you had no chance of getting any shade.We did complain to the management and a few more parasols were found but I think there should be 1 parasol per 2 sunbeds and it was still not even close to that.
The rooms were quite spacious – and the bathroom was good with lovely big showers. Bath and hand towels were replaced daily and you could also have beach towels every day too so no need to pack any towels really. Shampoo, conditioner and body lotion were also provided if you didn’t want to take those either. There is a hairdryer in the bathroom which is a bit feeble but Ok if you just wanted to dry your hair – if you wanted to style it in any way you will have to take your own. They have tea/coffee making stuff – kettle, mugs plus tea, coffee, sugar and milk powder but you might want to take your own tea bags – they tend to use tea flavoured with vanilla which is a bit of an aquired taste!
The staff are really helpful, especially the waitresses and waiters and the bar staff – Oh, and the boatmen are great too. Make sure you do at least one trip on the hotel boats – some are all inclusive but the best one for us was the dolphin watching trip which we had to pay for but was well worth the money and cheaper than the rep offered it to us.
Now for the not so good bit – the food! To be fair, after quite a few people had complained, the second week we were there it was a lot better but they shouldn’t wait until their ‘paying customers’ had to complain. The cooks were actually very good but in my opinion, the meat was poor quality and sometimes so tough it was inedible. But they made delicious sauces and there was always plenty in quantity and just about enough in choice although it did get a bit ‘samey’ after a while. Breakfast was always nice and the 2 lady cooks worked their socks off making omlettes, scrambled fried and boiled eggs, and my favourite, the crepes every morning. Hopefully the improvement in food quality will continue because when they got it right, it was delicious!
If you are with Mercury Direct and AI, the minibar is ‘free’ although there wasn’t much in there to get excitied about. But the cocktails at the bar are mostly included too and they were lovely – I’m missing them already and I’ve only been home 6 hours! But be warned they are pretty potent – no tiny optics in sight (scuse the pun!) the bar staff just sloshed in a massive amount of alchol by hand. There were non-alcholic cocktails too – the Sunset was delicious for any non drinkers. And as far as I could tell, there weren’t any limits as to how many drinks you could have when the bar was open.
The other slightly negative for us was that on our last day we had to check out around 10.00am although we weren’t being picked up until2.30 in the afternoon and were told we couldn’t have any food or drinks after we checked out unless we paid for it! However we asked at reception if we could have lunch as we had missed several lunches as we were out on trips. They reluctantly said yes but no drinks! Just a small point that left a bit of a sour taste on our last day and I know that lots of others felt the same.
But it didn’t spoil our holiday – it was lovely and Mauritius is a very lush and green island with lots of lovely places to visit. Although it was very hot and humid so we didn’t do quite as much as we had planned – just had to sit on the beach sipping cocktails instead…hard life, innit!?
