BIG4 Sawtell Beach Holiday Park — Hotel in Sawtell

The location is excellent, the reception a bit robotical....you can tell they tell their story a 100 times a day. We just had bad luck I guess. We booked for 2 nights driving back on our way home. I was quite sick, it was icy cold (5 degrees feeling like 2) with high winds and whilst we clearly had asked for a sunny spot in a message when we booked, we were designated a spot under the biggest (although very beautiful) tree there is, with NO SUN. Branches were swaying like mad, bit scary in that wind. We had a double, staged, slab, which is excellent, but you have to drive over the highest bit to get your van straight onto it. No problem for a high off road Van, but not doable for a low highway Van imo. It also had a broken curb. AND no sun !! Why? The park was half empty? Why bother asking for messages if you dont want to read them? Also the water would be cut off on day 2 for maintenance. So we decided to leave after the 1st night.. They were nice enough about it and credited us 1 day and said we should have told them we wanted another spot, but, being sick, high winds and freezing cold you just want to get settled and not have to argue or plead. Amenities at the bottom of the park still require a key and are reallly really old (with dirty marks around the door handles). I get it, old is hard to keep clean but..maybe put a hand sanitiser outside the door? We will try again one day but indeed will handle it...

We had booked into Sawtell for a couple of nights as it was advertised as a dog friendly park. This is not so! We were given a map of where the 6 dog friendly sites were - yes just 6!! Also we were given a map of where we could walk the dog, especialy to get to the beach. The park was not cheap - $39 a night off peak. When we found the dog friendly sites, they are stuck up the back of the park, with the oldest amenities block. The block we were allocated was D3 - which sloped both from front to back and side to side. Backing in was tricky as you had to navigate between the power pole and the taps. We put the levelers under one side, then had to take them out and put lumps of timer under the levelers, and this still wasn't level. Not only that, the van was then so high that we couldn't climb into it!! The dog area is all dust and dirt, with little of no grass. We were so disgusted that we put the van back together and went back and demanded a refund. Obviously they think they are doing dog owners a favour by taking the dogs,and they are treating the dog owners as second class citizens, not worthy of a nice site like the rest of the park gets. Yet the rates don't change! Come on Sawtell - you'll have to do...

Overall okay stay, very convenient location for where we needed to be, nice quiet coastal town, 2 minute walk to the Main Street, and right next door to the bowling club. Only a 10 minute drive to Coffs Harbour. We booked months in advance and asked precisely for a concrete slab site, with no trees, upon arrive we were given a worn out fake grass site, overloaded with trees, contacted reception about this when we got to our site, and asked if we could swap to the site in front of us as it was vacant at the time and had no trees, was told this wasn’t possible due to site sizes & availability, yet there was multiple vacant sites (exactly like we requested) throughout the course of our stay. Bathrooms could potentially be cleaned a little bit better also, appears they are just hosed out with minimal product, leaving the whole bathroom soaked, walls included. I would suggest a mop & bucket, to clean out the shower cubicals after use also. Amenities were overall tidy, but could be better with those...