The Ridge on Sedona Golf Resort

My wife, two teenage sons and I stayed at the Ridge for 3 nights recently. Our adjoining suites were clean, spacious and overall very nice.

My biggest complaint about The Ridge was the “concierge” service, which wasn’t actually a concierge service at all. It was sales. Period. They were very friendly and nice until we made it clear we were not interested in sitting through their presentation (which we were first told was 90 minutes, then 2 hours, and have heard can be up to 4 hours), then it was like someone flipped a switch.

After that they wouldn’t make a phone call, a reservation, tee times, or even recommend a hiking trail or suggest things to do. Nothing.

And the discount spa coupon we’d been promised, regardless of whether or not we went to the presentation, somehow never materialized. The facility and rooms were nice enough but the hard sell and then lack of service afterwards was enough to make me not want to come back again.

The resort itself deserves a 4.5 rating for accommodations, views and amenities. However, upon check in, you are directed to the ” check in concierge”, who diligently works to get you to take a 90 minute property tour by offering generous, discounts for golf, dinners, tours etc. I own two timeshare weeks at The Grand Timber Lodge and The Ridge Tahoe and have owned them for over 20 years. In all of the property presentation (tours) I have taken at many resorts in the past 10 years, the sales pitches were relatively low key with courteous sales staff. Not so at the Ridge Sedona. Diamond Resorts have reverted to the early days of timesharing where the industry got its bad name.

HIGH PRESSURE!/Boiler Room. I was embarrassed for my friends whom I convinced to take the tour. If you don’t know how to stand up, get in their face and say enough!! after 2 plus hours of obnoxious and unethical sales practices, then don’t be hoodwinked into taking the tour. It seems that every scallywag that was run out of unethical timeshare sales in the rest of the country has landed in Sedona operating for Diamond Resorts. Shame on the town of Sedona for not cracking down on Diamond Resorts.

The Ridge on Sedona Golf Resort is attractive, well situated and well maintained. The adjacent but unaffiliated golf course, nestled among dazzling views of the area’s red rock formations, couldn’t be prettier. But don’t expect much service, Just once during our weeklong stay, they took out our trash and brushed up the room. There are two heated and pleasant pools but no room service, no bar, no restaurant and no elevator. Most shops and restaurants are ten miles north in and around Sedona proper.

The Ridge is one of 250-some outposts of Diamond Resorts International, the time-share chain that specializes in selling portable rights to vacation homes, mostly condos. But nonmembers can often sample the Ridge without committing to buying a timeshare. You can stay a week at discounted rates, though in return, you’re urged to sit through an hour-long “presentation” about buying a time-share. Two salespeople park you and your spouse at a card table and make alternating pitches to persuade you to buy.

For us the Ridge had one great, irrefutable merit. That was our room, No. 1408, a second-floor, one-bedroom suite with a fully equipped kitchen in Building 14. Staff told us that the buildings were 20 years old. But 1408 felt new. It smelled new. Everything worked, everything fit. It was remarkably furnished, down to a gas-fueled fireplace and a flashlight for power outages plugged into a kitchen wall.

Many rooms are studios, albeit bigger and better equipped than many a hotel room, and many first floor rooms face parking lots. Happily, up on the second floor, 1408 came with an unobstructed view of those glorious rocks. To gauge our flat’s space, we counted the doors. There were nine, including a sliding glass door to the balcony where we savored brilliant pageants of sunsets and stars. Thus if like Proust we wanted to root ourselves to a hotel room–not play golf, hike in the rocks, take the two-hour drive north to the Grand Canyon—the Ridge and our room would get five rocking stars.

One complaint—trivial until it wasn’t–is the Ridge’s advertised Sedona address. The Ridge is in the unincorporated and little known village of Oak Creek, not in celebrated Sedona. The night of our arrival from Phoenix, the Oak Creek address drove us and our GPS systems nuts. Finally the Ridge’s telephone operator managed to lead us there, turn by turn.

This is the fourth Diamond resort we have stayed at and was by far the exception as it was the worst. While the interior was updated, the outside is not regularly maintained.

Upon our arrival, we noticed a giant faeces on the adjacent pathway which was there the duration of our trip. Also, an attic access hatch was left open the entire time as well. As has been noted in other reviews, the stairwells are full of trash.

Additionally, our daughters’ lock off had a marijuana smell that wafted from below. I reported these issues to the late afternoon crew and was told a maintenance person would meet me to address my concerns. They never showed up; however, the stairwell was picked up a bit.

After the smell continued we called the next morning to demand that the staff address the smell. By the time we came back from our hike, they had deodorized the room. The attic hatch and large poop were never addressed so I captured it in a photograph so that I could share what we were stuck looking at for six days.

An additional lapse is the cleanliness of the fitness room. The hand sanitizer and wipes were out completely thereby exposing guests to MRSA.

I won’t judge all Diamond resorts based on this filthy experience–maintenance is asleep at the wheel here.

This resort isn’t in Sedona. It’s in Oak Creek Village about 20 minutes from downtown Sedona. However, the Red Rock Scenic Byway, the route from the resort to Sedona is absolutely stunning.

The resort isn’t all that easy to find. Signage is deficient, including signage to the registration area. Parking near the registration area is inadequate and a good deal of space near the door to the registration area is set aside for golf carts used by the interval sales staff. The registration staff is reasonably efficient, but you are then immediately directed to the concierge staff and their primary and initial interest is to get you to sign up for a sales presentation for membership in Diamond Resorts chain. Some interval chains don’t hound guests to take presentation “tours,” others like Diamond and Welk do–and doing that is just plain tacky and entirely inappropriate. (For the record, we did go to a presentation and we did buy).

The exterior areas leading to our room were nice, but there was a poor design of the vents for the dryers (they are on top of the walkways to the doors to the rooms) so that they were pretty much bashed by carts and luggage hitting them again and again and again.

As we entered our unit, it was clear that the rug near the dining table was filthy. One of the most disgusting things we’ve ever seen in a timeshare (and we’ve owned timeshares for 35 years). There’s just no way that a supervisor should have let the maid get away with that.

There are two swimming pools. We tried one as it opened in the morning and it was quite simply, filthy. The maintenance person was still there, but he was playing with a water fountain and had done a terrible job cleaning the bottom of the pool and skimming the top of the water. We couldn’t bring ourselves into getting into it and went to the other pool, closer to the registration area instead. It was much cleaner, but leaves from a nearby tree were always falling into it. It was a fairly small pool and no good for swimming because about half of it is only three feet deep. Near that pool, though, is a very nice hot tub (the other pool does not have a hot tub adjacent to it–in fact it’s quite distant and down a sizable flight of stairs),

This resort seems prone to power outages. We experienced two. The first proved to be disastrous. We had paid $30 for internet access and the first two days of the service was fine, but the power outage brought us only local access and we could not connect to the internet. In fact, we were never again able to connect to the internet (from Tuesday afternoon through Saturday afternoon). Neither AT&T nor the resort itself was able to do anything to get us internet service, although one member of the registration staff was deeply committed to helping us on Wednesday, going well beyond the call of duty. We found this failure to resolve the internet problem to be deeply disturbing. We were unable to keep up with many things and we were unable to use the internet to get vital information about the area. The second power outage was on Saturday. We were doing our wash and left to go to Sedona for breakfast. When we returned we discovered that the items in the dryer were still quite wet. When the power went off the dryer went off and didn’t go back on.

The cabinets in the kitchen were pretty shopworn and badly needed replacement–one more sign of neglect and inadequate management attention to detail and quality.

Our unit did not have much of a view, although some units that face to the north (toward Sedona itself) would seem to have good views (but only if the view isn’t obscured by fencing installed to keep golf balls from a nearby fairway from hitting the buildings).

The availability of hot water was intermittent. Usually, all you got was fairly cold water out of the hot water tap, but sometimes, blessedly, there actually was some hot water from the start. In a desert area, it’s simply wrong to have to run water forever in the hope (too often vain hope) of it actually getting even warm.

One final thing. Although there were just two of us, the unit we were in is listed as sleeping four (two in the bedroom and two on the sleeper couch in the living room). However, there were only four each of various plates and bowls. And the kitchen table itself sits only four, despite the fact that this unit can be joined with a lockout unit that sleeps yet another two. If the lockout was open, there simply wouldn’t be enough dishes or even enough space around that dining room table. Even the living room was a bit strange. It had the couch/sleeper and one chair. That worked well for the two of us, but if there had been four (or more with an open lockout) it would have been completely inadequate.