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Sandals Grande Ocho Rios Traveler Review :: "Great staff, best dive. Bad food. Room has ants, too noisy."

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Summary of All Property Reviews Ratings based on answers from a total of 4 reviews (All Reviews) 10 is best 1 is worst
Feature	Ranking	Feature	Ranking
Cleanliness of Property	6.50	Quality of Property	7.25
Privacy & Quietness	3.00	Quality of Service	9.00
Courtesy & Hospitality of Staff	9.50	Accuracy of Website (marketing hype) VS. Actual Experience	4.75
Food and Dining Experience	6.50	Price/Value of Property	5.75
Safety Factor (Did you feel safe at property)	9.50	Quality of Beach (ranked closest beach if property is located off the beach)	7.00
Total Property Score: 6.88 | Average Star Rating: 3.50 out of 5

• 50% (2 visitors of 4) said they would go back to Sandals Grande Ocho Rios again.
• 50% (2 visitors of 4) said they would recommend Sandals Grande Ocho Rios to friends.

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When reading this review, please take into consideration that
1. We stayed at the Oceanfront rooms on the Riviera side
2. I am rather spoiled and have high expectations of food and services.

Bottom line:
Sandals Ocho Rios is not worth the money you’d have to pay, for the same price we pay for each Ocean View Suite for 12 days with all the airfare from California, we could have each bought a 20 day balcony room on most cruise lines and drink as much alcohol as one can reasonably consume – 4 drinks a day each, for two.
Pros:
Extremely personable and friendly staff (Best of housekeeping: Hamulia).
Patient and professional diving instructors (Best Instructor: Trusty).
Bird songs between sunrise and sunset.
Cons:
Shady with bills.
Entire resort has a run down feel to it, nothing is ever quite clean.
Bad food, very little options as to what you can eat. Restaurants and bars are always closed.
Tries to “upgrade” guests into villas without ocean view.
Rooms have rats, bugs of various types (including a very tenacious ant colony), and the furniture is old and smells of mildew.

Dive Shop
My fiancé and I both got certified in the dive shop. The staff was friendly and helpful. Our instructor Trusty was an extremely good teacher, very patient, knowledgeable, and professional. He was goofy and friendly when we were out of lessons, but very serious during. There was no faulty equipment during our total of 12 dives - staff check and double and triple check all equipment before renting them out. We were extremely impressed!
The SCUBA was the best part of this entire experiences, reef was interesting, full of lives and colourful fishes, huge variety of hard and soft corals, a wrack-dive site near the resort, it was wonderful!

The Resort Itself
The resort is separated into a Riviera side and a Manor side by the main street of the Island. To go from one side to the other, wait for the bus. If you do not see yourself doing so, please expect only half as much amenities as promised.

How we got there:
Reception in airport was wonderful, staff members from both resort and airport are extremely personable and friendly.
Bus ride to the resort (approximately 2 hour 15 minutes) was good, roomy and comfortable even on the dirt road. However, the ride back from the resort to the airport was HORRID: cramped, dirty, bumpy, luggage insecurely piled [see photo #1].

Reception/reservations at the resort: Shady!
They made mistakes in our room reservations, claimed that the room we paid for (Ocean View Suites with balconies) were no longer available, as well as any ocean view rooms, so they would “upgrade” us to one of the villas that were situated right by busy paths, and couldn’t see the ocean at all. Upon our refusal, there were suddenly 3 ocean view rooms without balcony available, and we were to check the availabilities of balcony rooms the next day... shady. So it went. At the end, we moved into what we paid for—we paid for 12 days, and stayed in the ocean-view w/balconies for 10 days, after 1-2 moves.

Noise
The Oceanfront rooms we had were situated 2 and 3 floors above the Bayside restaurant—which had a large outdoor under-our-balcony eating veranda—the Riviera bar which had another huge drinking veranda with drunken people at any given time. Do not delude yourselves that 3 floors would mask the noise, because it didn’t: live music until either 9pm or 10pm, bar open until midnight, drunken guests having fun until whenever they wish (we called management at 4am to asked them to please request the guests to quiet down a little since we had to fly home the next day, and the noise subsided for 10 minutes and returned until sunrise.)

Pests
We had to battle with ants (because one of us is allergic to ant bites) through out our 12-day stay, and 2 of the nights we had rat visits—that guy was approximately... big. We spoke with management, and guess what? They “granted” us a free breakfast in this all-inclusive resort! Sigh... haven’t we already paid for all-inclusive vacation already?

General room conditions
Entire room smelled of mildew. Walls were dirty, carpet sticky. Furniture was old and made of some kind of resin that was then spray-painted to look like stone (the attempt failed miserably); insides of drawers were just raw wood that splinters, and smelled of mildew. Décor was of poor taste. Air conditioning didn’t work reliably, and remote control didn’t work at all, and apparently no one knew how to fix it... Maid cleaned randomly throughout our stay.


Food
There were close to no options: please choose amongst this extremely-greasy-but-taste-like-cardboard-food and that extremely-fatty-food-that-taste-like-cardboard. Diet was unbalanced, you’d feel like crap if you are used to paying attention to what you stuff yourselves with. When I got home, I put on 8 lbs and felt like I had been eating fast food for 5 weeks.
There was pepper in every entrée, side dishes, and even in my freaking desert once. Sigh... Those who have hypersensitive bitterness receptors please be warned. There was usually the option between pasta with pepper, rice with pepper, meat with pepper, all with 3 times more grease than necessary to unleash the lipo-soluble tastes. All vegetables except peppers were wilted and unappetizing. All beef entrées were tough with no moisture at all. All pork smelled of goat (!?). 3 out of the 6 of us got mild food-poisoning, 1 of us got it bad.

Restaurants and Bars
There were 8 restaurants and some 10 bars in the entire resort, but for most time of day, most days of the week only 2 out of the 8 restaurants and 2 out of the 10 bars were open at a time—1 in the Manor, 1 in the Riviera . If your sleeping and eating schedule does not happen to fall in the same schedule as the restaurants, then you are SOL—you can choose from French fries and hotdogs (maybe) or starve until the restaurants open again. It was not unusual to see guests walking all over the resort grounds trying to find a bar that was open. To give a better idea of their service schedule: it was a BIG deal that FIVE of their restaurants would be open at the same time in the celebration of the Christmas!!!
Tip: All dinner restaurants were too dark for any one to read a menu, bring your own key chain flashlights.

New Year Celebration
On New Year’s Eve, they had the guts to close EVERY SINGLE ONE of their restaurants so the guests who wished to eat at all had to go to the Manor and eat on the lawn... Dress code was formal, so it was really fun to watch ladies in their best dresses, and their high-heel shoes digging deep into the lawn as they walked; not so fun when I had to do so myself and made the bottom of my white dress a fresh grass juice colour.

Shady Billing
30 minutes before we left the resort, as we checked out, they told us that we still had some $200 credit amongst us. So we shopped the gift shop and used up the money on stupid frivolous but fun things we never would have otherwise bought. Then they delayed the bus from driving away by saying, “oops, never mind that, there is no credit.” So if we didn’t want everyone on the bus to wait for us digging out the items that we picked out and already tucked away into the luggage pile, we had to pay for them, and we did.

Property Review
10 is best 1 is worst

Would you stay at this property again?: ... No
Would you recommend this property to your friends?: ... No
In your opinion, how would you classify the "style" of this property: ... Family Oriented
Possible Anwswers: Family Oriented, Couples Oriented, Mixed/Diverse in a Good Way, Mixed/Diverse in a Bad Way

• Cleanliness of Property: ... 2
• Quality of Property: ... 5
• Privacy and Quietness: ... 2
• Quality of Service: ... 10
• Courtesy and Hospitality of Staff: ... 9
• Accuracy of Website VS. Actual Experience: ... 1
  
• Food and Dining Experience: ... 1
• Price/Value of Property: ... 1
  
• Safety Factor (Did you feel safe at property): ... 10
• Quality of Beach (ranked closest beach if property is located off the beach): ... 10

Destination/Island Review
10 is best 1 is worst

Would you visit this destination/island again?: ... Yes
Would you recommend this destination/island to your friends?: ... Yes

• Cleanliness of Destination/Island: ... 6
• Options of Activities in the Area: ... 10
• Ease of Transportation (air, taxi, bus, shuttle): ... 1
• Quality of Beaches in the Area: ... 10
• Courtesy & Hospitality of Locals: ... 10
• Safety Factor (Did you feel safe in the Area): ... 10
  
• Local Restaurant Experience/Options: ... 10
• Price/Value of Destination (Does your dollar stretch?): ... 10
  

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