Bay Gardens Vacation Club

Lovely hotel – beware of hard-sell timeshare

Review of Bay Gardens Beach Resort

Reviewed 7 October 2014

This is a truly lovely hotel. The rooms are spacious and kept in excellent order, the staff friendly and the food excellent. We had a two bedroomed apartment with a kitchen, which we did use a lot as the food was expensive.

The hotel is very well located, with a local shopping centre close by and its own beach. An area of rocks are five minutes away and provide safe snorkelling. The balconies are spacious, with simply wonderful views, and happy hour is very good value for a welcome rum cocktail as the sun sets over the Caribbean.

If this had been our only experience, I would have given the hotel four or five stars. However, when we were arranging our trips out with the concierge, we were asked if we wanted to have lunch with a member of staff to provide some feedback on the hotel.

This turned out to be a fairly high pressure, a two-hour one-to-one presentation on timeshare, despite us making it fairly clear at the beginning of the meal that we weren’t interested.

In the end, we had to tell the children to go and read in the room while we were taken to an office to be pressed to pay £10,000 by the end of the day for something we had no intention of buying.

Perhaps it was naive of us to expect a free lunch in exchange for some market research – I’d rather have paid for the meal and got the woman to leave us alone.

It definitely took the shine off the holiday.