Marriott Vacation Club at Surfers Paradise — Hotel in Gold Coast City

It was 4pm and the feelings were delightful upon walking into the grandeur lobby with our kids. The kids started to get excited as a us, parents, as we anticipated lots of fun time in this Marriott property. My son has been a great fan of Marriott hotels since his first visit. Checking in to the room was a smooth process and the front desk staff was awesome. As we entered the room, we tried to search for the promised beds to accommodate two adults and two kids as we only saw a king-sized bed in the room. After a few minutes of search and finding, I finally found the sofa bed with pop corns and cigarette butt left by last guests under and around the bed and wardrobe. We went straight to the beach 5 minutes away from the property. At 6pm when we got back to our room, we expected the room to be turned down and the sofa bed prepared but it was not. I had to prepare the sofa bed myself by taking out the bedding stuff from the wardrobe. I thought this was the norm of Australian hotel service and so I did not mind. Before midnight, my wife and I decided to have our breakfast in room. The next morning, breakfast came on time and we were prepared to let the kids feast. To my surprise, I found spots of mold on a few pieces of bread and I called the hotel to get rid of the food straight away. My kid nearly took a bite but was fortunately stopped by me. The hotel called and apologized and asked to exchange for a new set of breakfast but I refused to take a new set as I did not want to take a chance of putting our guts in danger of poisoning as I just had a diarrhea a few days ago. I requested the staff to inform her manager and the kitchen and she said she would, and that was it. No more updates or response regarding the incident from the hotel management. As we walked around the hotel, staff would ask “how was your stay?”, and my responses were about the experience we had on the breakfast and all staff would say the typical same thing “I am so sorry. I will let our manager know about that”. We attended the Marriott Vacation Club presentation and let 2 of the staff know how was our perception on the service of this Marriott Vacation Club. We even asked them again whether this Marriott Vacation Club is 5-star hotel and they said yes but maybe not the service, especially in Gold Coast and further explained nicely that "this is normal in Australia, the service in Australia sucks and you would be able to receive better services in our properties in other parts of the world. Ok... That means I should just accept this service and expect the better from other Marriott Vacation Club properties after paying at least AUD28,500. Well, only a person out of their mind would do that even if they had too much money to throw down the drain. Would we still sign up after knowing that we would had to guess which Marriott Vacation clubs would give us awful service? We told in total 5 staff including the staff upon checking out about the incident but received no respond from the manager at all. Are they going to do something to the kitchen processes? Are they going to improve their service? This is the service you can expect from Marriott Vacation Club, as verified by their own staff.

Apart from awful service by manager and kitchen head, other staff are really courteous and nice. The sea water pool was impressive. We had a great time at...

Well I always wondered how just a few people tend to have terrible experience sat accommodations. Now I know!!|We are local to the Marriott and deiced to celebrate my 79th Birthday at the Hotel stay overnight with breakfast included. Sounds Good !! Read on.|Firstly the actual property and outside areas are superb and the customer facing staff hugely friendly and helpful and the first day was good. But DAY TWO !!!!!!|OK down for our include breakfast and the first think that struck us was how busy the restaurant was and how many noisy and disruptive families when having breakfast. So spotted a small table for two by the window and asked the hotel staff if we could sit in that quiet spot. They said yes and guide us to the nice quiet spot but what happens next. Well the same staff member now seats a large family with lots of noisy young children, etc throwing items on the floor etc, next to us !!!!!!!!!!|Anyway lets get dine. Crikey the fried eggs are burnt at the edges and look awful the bacon is a jumble of cooked, uncooked and perfectly cooked pieces, the Hash Brown are like cardboard. This really is two star fare not five star fare. Marriott for goodness sake offer your guest a Family and Child free area in which to have a relaxing breakfast.||Anyway pretty awful experience so we escaped back to our room only to find that the Hotel was doing MAINTENANCE in the room joining ours so lot of hammering and drilling, AGGGH !!! Marriott do not star hammering and drilling until your paying guest have checked out !!!!!!!|So once again we are driven out of the location so packed quickly and left the room only to find the corridor fully blocked my large heavy maintenance trolleys so we could not even leave the hotel. So back to our room to ring reception to arrange to have the BARICADE cleared so that we could actually check out. ||Don't know about you but for over $600 a nigh we do not expect to be subjected to the Hotel staff hammering and drilling in the adjoining room ??||Got to hand it to the Marriott in that I don't think that they could have done anything else to make our day...

Budget hotel room with a champagne price tag. This is the kind of hotel people stay at to make themselves feel good about themselves by saying they stayed there when in reality the only fancy part about it is the name and the lobby.

We honestly felt the only redeeming part of this place was the pool.

When we checked in we were told we would get a message when the room was ready - they never sent the message. When I went to inquire again the same host had forgotten she had even started checking me in, despite the fact that she had brought her manager out earlier to “meet and greet us” which felt like an attempt to sign us up to a time share information session. We also had to call and request to receive our luggage as they never brought it up.

We unfortunately booked the vacation club instead of the main Marriott hotel and what a mistake that was. The mattress was the same quality you’d expect from an entry level fantastic furniture mattress, the room was dark and looked nothing like the pictures, and the cupboard doors weren’t even hung at the same heights.

There seems to be a lot of staff hanging around doing not much. We went down to get drinks and ordered 2 straight whiskies that took over 20 minutes to arrive while the women behind the bar stood around talking to each other.

When house keeping came around while we were out they picked up our dirty underwear we had in pile separate from our clean luggage and put them on the sink which we found really disturbing as we’ve never had that happen anywhere we have stayed.

We’ve vacationed at an array of hotels from the fanciest places money can buy all the way through to budget big 4 resorts, and this was by far the worst experience we’ve had. With SO many other options on the Gold Coast we will never...