Sutori - Stories Tagged With 'Resorts'

Almond Casuarina Beach

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:00:05 -0800

The Almond Casuarina Beach hotel in Barbados was bought by Almond resorts, in June, 2005 it was closed for refurbishment. It was due to reopen December 2005.

This hotel is currently still closed with heavy contruction work in progress, many new opening dates have been advertised over the last 3 years. The latest advertised date is 1st May,08.

Bookings for this hotel have been taken over this time by holiday companies and then just before their departure date customers are transfered to their sister hotels at the other end of Barbados (Almond Beach Village & Beach Club) a completly different location and style of holiday.

No compensation is offered and companies like Virgin holidays will not allow any other hotel for the change without paying extra to move.

No details of the fact that the hotel is not open is given at the time of booking.

This hotel is being miss-sold! There is no mention of the hotel not being open.

Virgin Holiday's state in their brochure that the Almond Casuarina Beach is a Virgin Favourites hotel - quote "All hotels in the Virgin Holiday's Favourites range have scored highly in our customer satisfaction survey of previous customers. So you can be confident that the standards and service of our Virgin Favourites meet the expectations of our customers. They are inspected thoroughly on a regular basis to ensure our exacting standards are always met".

How can this be! this hotel was a self catering 3* accomodation that was closed down in 2005. Not a 4* All inclusive. How did they get their scores?

I am one of these customers due to travel on 1st June,08. I am getting no information from Almond or Virgin Holidays. I booked St Lawrence Gap which is where the Casuarina is situated because I have family there. I did,nt find out about the hotel until I did a Trip Advisor seach some weeks later. I cried after seeing the photo's of the building site that was supposed to be our dream holiday in the Caribean.

Virgin will not tell us we are transfered until close to our departure date, will not allow us to change to another hotel in the same location without further expence or compensate for the change.

Goodwill - what's that?