Relaxing Holiday with some downsides
May 19, 2019 344christoffert
Today is our last day in the St. Regis Saadiyat. We enjoyed our stay with the family (parents in law + my wife / me). Yet there were some downsides to it that are not meeting up with a 5-star hotel standard. But let’s take a review on the different categories.
- HOTEL BUILDING -
The hotel is modern, clean and very beautiful. The rooms have a…
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Today is our last day in the St. Regis Saadiyat. We enjoyed our stay with the family (parents in law + my wife / me). Yet there were some downsides to it that are not meeting up with a 5-star hotel standard. But let’s take a review on the different categories.
- HOTEL BUILDING -
The hotel is modern, clean and very beautiful. The rooms have a decent size and the bath room is definitely upper standard (Basic Room). Everything is very clean and the decoration is modern traditional. Nothing to complain here, it’s a great and beautiful building!
5/5 stars
- BEACH -
The beach is nice and you can do a very long beach walk. The sand is nice, yet not “carribean”, but really nothing to complain. Sad thing is that there’s a big construction site at the beach ongoing at the moment. Noise is still ok, yet the view is obviously not so nice. We took the “Family Area” at the beach to move away from the construction site. Yet if being in the “Adult” area is important for you it might be a bummer.
Staff at the beach is nice. Depending on who is on service they are engaging you more proactively or not. Here is room for improvement. We stayed at the St. Regis Bali last year and here you got constantly new water, you got asked if your sunglasses should be cleaned, and many different things - all of this not in an annoying fashion!
4/5 stars
- DINING -
Sooo dining. The food is good, yet not changing too much in variation. But there is so much offered that you can find different food every day even if it would be exactly the same for 5 days. Overall quality is good - excellent. But now comes (for us) the most embarrassing part: You get free water all day, but in the evening you have to pay 30 AED (~7€) for a bottle of low to standard quality water. This clearly is just to squeeze more money out of the guests pockets and is at max a 3-star hotel standard. Just as a comparison: In our hotel in Dubai and the desert we got free water and one glass of free wine for the half board. Apart from this really bad service you get free juice at the buffet - so logic really goes south here. Disappointing!
We quitted taking water just for principle and depending on the staff the waiters even became a bit unfriendly since we didn’t ordered drinks any more.
Just to get things straight here: It would have been really high likely that we would order a glass or bottle of vine but we don’t like the feeling of being screwed. Sadly it even got a running gag.
3/5 stars
- SERVICE STAFF -
Here it really depends on the individual person and area where you are. As an example the waiter “Good Luck” always had a big smile on his face (we met him at breakfast) and was very professional and friendly. In the evening it really depended on the waiter in charge (described above). Reception did their job in a professional, yet not over engaging way - this is a the first point of contact so they should to everything that you feel totally welcomed. We also had to search our room ourselves when we arrived. Yet Alina (butler; see below) came to the room just 5 minutes after we entered.
In general it sometimes feels a bit that the service staff has to be friendly instead of wanting to be friendly and loving what they do. I also want to compare to the St. Regis Bali here: Everyone was all the time overly engaged, smiling and friendly. Small fun fact: We arrived 1 day after my wife’s birthday in both hotels. The St. Regis Bali congratulated and even had brought a cake to our villa before we entered the room. The St. Regis Saadiyat didn’t even notice the 1 day ago birthday. This kind of describes the difference in attention and service. Some things you don’t expect but you would be overly happy and feeling welcomed when they are recognized and you keep them (as you can see) in mind.
One thing to be mentioned is that we stayed during the month of Ramadan which is really tough for those who participate - we really respect their discipline and engagement. So maybe the service is a bit higher outside the Ramadan period, because people are simply less stressed.
So overall service 4/5
- ROOM BUTLERS -
I hope the manager reads this and understands that the outstanding job of the butlers saved the rating a bit. Alina and her colleagues did a tremendous job to give us a positive feeling and being more than just a guest. I really want to mention especially Alina here, because she was very professional, yet totally friendly and lovely. This again was truly high standard and we really want to thank her that she made our stay really pleasant. She was always smiling and helping even with the smallest thing!
6/5 stars
- FINAL VERDICT -
It may sound that we are totally spoiled people but we are not. We are even offering help in carrying stuff on our own because we think it’s a matter of respect. We have been lucky in seeing some really nice hotels in the emirates in our recent stay and seeing some nice other hotels around the world. So we have a pretty good picture of how things can be. Apart from that we are working a lot and just have our holidays to relax a bit. For that reason we have a certain baseline. I hope this feedback helps in improvement, because the foundation is definitely there. Yet the standards clearly doesn’t meet up to the international St. Regis standards that we could enjoy in the past.
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