Grand Sirenis San Andrés — Hotel in Saint Andrew

I am going to not try to be super negative, as this place did indeed have some redeeming factors.

Note, this is a hotel, not a resort. It is unfinished. No spa, no activities, just a buffet which is closed a few times throughout the day, but a snack bar for other times.

The check in/check out ladies were fantastic. Warm, charismatic, and charming. We came here on our honeymoon, but really had to do many things for ourselves, see below:

The room was nice. Super cold, a little damp, but no smell in our sea view patio suite like other had mentioned they had. The room was clean, the bed was clean, and we felt secure there with our stuff.

The buffet was good, different selections daily, though to find a properly cooked piece of French toast was hard to find at breakfast (most were gooey and uncooked inside). The desserts at every meal were lackluster. In-fact, 90% of the deserts were 99% gelatin and colour with no differentiating flavour. After the second day I did let the front desk know these concerns - of course nothing changed.

The food service was ok. Lots of staff, but not a lot of urgency. Some gems amongst the staff redeemed the others. Note, no espresso drinks in the buffet, just acceptable drip coffee.

The one a la carte restaurant was Italian. It was not very good at all. No lie when I state that the lasagna was worse than some of those frozen at home lasagnas that you can buy and bake yourself. It was mushy, and the first lasagna that neither of us could eat. The desserts in the Italian restaurant onsite were even worse than the buffet offerings. One bite of each - we were done. The wine served onsite ranks under 3.0 on Vivino, and costs on average $5/USD globally per bottle.

There is not a lot to do in the hotel, and with a rainy week there we did find some pretty boring parts, as we had exhausted all shopping options, and other activities outside the hotel like Morgan's Cave, and scuba diving.

By day 4, we had run out of sugar and coffee creamer in our room as it was never refilled. At 7:45am I called the front desk, and they said no one was in yet, and we would have to go down to the buffet to get it ourselves. On our way to the buffet to do just that, we checked the front counter and there were 3 gals just chatting and leaning against the counter with no guests in sight.

All in all, not sure why this is a 5-star hotel. There is better service in some 3.5 star hotels in Bogota, and this is nothing like the Grand Sirenis in Playa Del Carmen, despite the same price.

Not sure if I would recommend it or not. Definitely not for four days like we had. I would however recommend finding another nice hotel to stay at, and exploring the other restaurants on the island, and saving the spent money for all the activities offered by the island.

Thank you to the few staff that made us feel welcome, you did make up for those other that made us feel like we...

We are here for 5 nights in total and have been here 1 night and have 2 big issues so far and have decided to post a mid stay review as we don’t feel we’d be listened to if we approached the front desk again. 1: When booking through a third party I made the mistake of not booking a room with a balcony, my fault obviously. After checking in we made a request to be upgraded if possible and were happy to pay for the upgrade. We were told no balcony rooms were available but the interesting aspect of that is that booking.com and their own website showed rooms available. We were told to ask them every morning in case a room becomes available. 2: When we checked in to our room everything seemed ok to begin with, however by the evening the room had a terrible mouldy smell to it. I had a bit of a look around and there was black mould throughout the bathroom, the air conditioner vent and all around the edges in the ceiling of the room. This morning we asked about the possibility of upgrading and told them about the mould in the room and can’t stay in that room. We were told a little bit later that we were getting a room change but no mention of paying for an upgrade. We’ve got our new room and there appears to be no smell or signs of mould so far. We were on level 7 with an ok view, however we are now on a lower level (4)and less of a view, a slight downgrade it seems. The thing that has upset us quite a lot and spoiling our stay here is not that we can’t arrange an upgrade but the fact that we haven’t even received an apology or anything and poor communication. We feel like we have actually been an inconvenience to them. We don’t see why a request daily from us is required, we’ve put in the request already. The gentleman at the front desk is nice and seems that he wants to help and but the other person who appears to possibly been the manager has no people skills she abruptly just asked “are your bags packed?” And nothing else. We didn’t actually get and answer if we were able to pay for the upgrade, or any communication on that at all, we were just showed to our new room on a lower level and less of a view than before, the only apology for our inconvenience was from the porter. It’s our first time staying in a hotel of this supposed calibre and thought the experience would be a lot better than it is and it’s only been 24 hours. A good point I’d like to make is that the restaurant staff are amazing as are the hotel porters. We are not going to dwell on these issues and don’t expect anything for free or special treatment from our early review, but an improvement in communication and not feeling like we are an inconvenience would be a good change. We now just look forward to what San Andres...

Where to start... We booked this hotel looking forward to our first stay in a fully catered 5-star hotel as a treat for our honeymoon. Unfortunately this quickly became reminiscent of something from White Lotus.

​Our issues began at the buffet, where we found the food to be consistently poorly labelled. A significant lack of clear signage for vegetarian and vegan options forced us to rely on a diet of mostly chips. Compounding this, we observed a severe lack of separate serving spoons for different dishes, leading to clear cross-contamination of food. This is not only a major concern for those with allergies but also made us deeply uncertain about the vegetarian and vegan status of the food we were eating.

​Hoping for a better experience, we booked a dinner at the Italian restaurant. We explicitly communicated our dietary requirements to the waiter: no meat for either of us, and no dairy, cheese, eggs, or butter for my wife.

​My wife was served Minestrone Soup containing what the chef later confirmed were lardons. ​The main course was no better. After re-confirming our dietary needs, my wife was served spaghetti cooked in butter.

In terms of general hotel it had a strange stench of body odour throughout the main communal areas and trying to book anything with the concierge took over an hour in which they left vital pieces of information out such as what to bring and telling us to arrive well before required time resulting in a large chunks of time wasted.

The facilities had leaks throughout where putting bucket underneath seemed to be the only action taken and the decor seemed to be tired despite the hotel being relatively new. There was also a distinct lack of any decor or pride taken in the hotel's appearance.

The social events consisted of someone screaming down a microphone whilst we were trying to relax in a pool at 5pm most days with the volume turned...