Sky Water Villas — Hotel in Sabah

We stayed for just two nights. Positives first:|It’s an amazing location, as gorgeous a tropical experience in the middle of the sparkling, aquamarine Malaysian sea you can dream of. |The rooms are nice and fairly spacious, supplied with air-con, ceiling fan etc, and have a comfortable resort feel with great views from bed. |As already stated, all meals – breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner are included in the package, and the food is generally pretty good, with plenty of fresh seafood and fruit, although many dishes are fried and spicy. |Staff are friendly and obliging.|There are some things provided free of charge (I think, as we didn’t use them) – transparent canoe, snorkelling gear etc.||Rooms – on the plus side, the sliding doors lead to a nice decking terrace area, with steps down to the sea. Unfortunately, our sliding door’s lock was broken, which made us feel insecure.|The bathroom shower looks good but only provides low-pressure water, which often goes cold. Yes, we’re in the middle of the sea, but at these prices it’s unacceptable. There is no hot water tap in the bathroom, again unacceptable. How hard can it be to put a small heater on the wall? There is very little space to place your toiletries. The tiling is broken in places and needs repairing. As mentioned in another review, rooms are not provided with hand towels or shower mats, you have to ask for them. Again, at this price point – why? Our duvet had a musty smell and we asked for it to be replaced. Pillow cases were discoloured. Although clean looking, everything feels like it could do with a deep clean. ||Public areas – firstly, there are not very many, and they have a very rustic, rather unfinished feel, as if they have been knocked together with a load of spare wood hanging around. Steps down to the water are often slippery, and need some kind of gripping mats. The piers/walkways the villas are on do not have adequate rails preventing people slipping off. ||Restaurant – although it has an attractive feel, it is extremely limited in terms of offerings. There is no a la carte menu, and you cannot get alcoholic drinks, a real missed money-spinning opportunity. Shockingly for an expensive resort, there is no coffee machine, just sachets of instant. Chatting to one of the few non Chinese guests, I mentioned this, to which he replied: “The resort is full, whether there is a coffee machine or not. Why should the owner provide one?” Yikes. There is water and some kind of squash/cordial in the buffet area, but no fruit juice or other hot drinks, until I asked a staff member for tea, and he fetched teabags. Why not put on display for everyone? And why not Chinese tea available, when 90% of guests are Chinese? Clueless and inconsiderate. There is a damaged, unplayable mini pool table, with a single broken cue. ||There are no Jacuzzi, sauna or spa facilities, again an egregious oversight. How hard would it be to convert an existing villa into a spa, or build a new one, and get staff from the mainland – only a 10-minute boat ride – to offer these services? The place is full of well-heeled guests who would jump at the chance of a bit of pampering, and pay good prices.||The mini-mart is a joke, stocking only the most basic snacks as well as beer. There is such a great opportunity for a decent little store offering good quality products – swimwear, gifts, toiletries, wine etc, the kind of things you would expect at a quality resort. Another missed potential money-making opportunity, but more importantly, no way for guests to get essential products and have no other opportunity to buy, unless they take a bone-shaking round-trip boat ride to the mainland. I went to buy a couple of beers and had to knock on the locked door for 5 minutes before the shirtless boy woke up to serve me!||There are signs warning guests to treat the sea, sea life, coral etc with respect, but I could clearly see a sun lounger on the sea bottom just yards from our villa, a few feet deep, rusting away into the ocean. Why wouldn’t staff remove this hazard to both guests and the environment? And on the subject of staff, as nice as most are, they should not be allowed to smoke as they walk around the resort doing their work, as some did.||You may think that picking out negative details in this way is petty, but when you are paying top dollar, the availability of small things – hand towels, room to place all your toiletries (and somewhere to buy some you may have forgotten), a decent shower, a proper cup of coffee, a glass of wine etc – make all the difference. It’s this attention to detail (or lack, in this case) that makes guests want to return. Yes, the surroundings are amazing and the rooms and food pretty good, but at these prices they had damn well better be. ||As the majority of guests are Chinese, perhaps the management rely on tourists from that country’s relatively recent international travel and tourism experience in terms of accepting the facilities as they are uncomplainingly, hoping they don’t know any better. But this resort does NOT meet Western standards of service and general quality, at this (high) price point. I saw another reviewer mentioned paying 600€ per night! We didn’t pay that much, but it’s still expensive. There is a sense of management apathy, as if they are doing the minimum possible and know guests will come, paying good money, regardless. A weird combination of greed in this sense, and lack of ambition, in not providing amenities guests would definitely pay for.||I don’t know what resort the other reviewers stayed at but I can’t help feeling that they are very generous with their 4 and 5-star reviews! Nice, helpful staff does not compensate for a resort lacking in even some of the most basic requirements.||We still managed to have a good time, thanks to the beauty of the location, decent room, food and nice staff, but this resort offers so much potential which is currently not being met. A wasted opportunity and a real shame. The management should be ashamed...

The Sky Water Villas mainly focusses on Chinese guests. The Semporna region is very nice to dive and scuba dive, and Sky Water Villas seemed to be a good base for us to explore the region. |We got in direct contact with the sales manager Isaac and we booked an overwater suite for 4 nights. ||We got an airport pickup arragened by Cumie, and were welcomed at the semporna jetty. The resort has a seperate boat pickup at the side of the main jetty. The deck is not that steady and the surroundings are a bit shabby for a 5- star hotel departure. |The boat ride takes about 30 minutes to the resort. ||We got welcomed by David and his crew and recieved a welcome drink and got handed over the keys to chalet number 11. It is sun rise faced and relatively close to the power generator. It makes a reasonable amount of noise, also at night. Be aware, you are more than 1 km from the main island shore, the resort is self sufficient. ||The chalet we got was relatively new built, but had some minor flaws, and should need some improvements, so it can comply to our high standards and expectations we had. |The bathroom needs more hangers, and the water of the shower is not very warm. The soap and water goes directly in the ocean. I cannot imagine this is eco-friendly. |The sleeping area was nicely decorated, the beds are confortable, clean and the airconditioning is cold. A small minibar is provided and daily stacked with refreshments. The tv has smart apps so we could watch a movie as a family. |On request we got two extra beds for our children (9-12). We later realised we paid the full adult price for the two, and we also could have booked two chalets for the same price. I raised this to the sales team, but this is a “management decision” |On the other side, it was nice and cosy to sleep all together as a family. |The price we paid was 600€ per night. For the price we got all in service with breakfast, lunch, tea time and dinner. |The diners we had were good. Because of the buffet-style we had to be early, because other guests (Chinese) had the tendency to stack their plates and didnt leave a lot, and the new round takes time. |This is the main situation. The cultural differences and difference in standards. |We went on a island hopping tour. We saw people standing on the corals, picking up the seastars, and throwing plastic in the sea. I tried my best and used google translate to educate the chinese guests to please not do this. ||The resort has a beautifull house reef. When the tide is low, you can enter the water at the end. With higer tide you can snorkle around the resort. It is an aquarium. ||The staff are truely amazing. Thank you David and Ryan for playing with our kids. ||I hope more people will discover this gem. |Experience...

I have been traveling through Asia for the last 25 years and I this has been the worst experience. The check in in Semporna peer with Chimie an the rest of the staff was welcoming. However, once we arrived to the hotel everything changed. We were received by a group of unwelcoming young of people. They told us that the lunch would be from 12.00-14.00. We unpacked and arrive at the reception for lunch al 13.00 and there was almost no food, they told us “no more food”. I asked for a plate and a glass and they laughed at me, we waited for 15 minutes and they brought us two plates covered with water, they even didn’t dry them. After lunch we did some snorkelling and we saw a group of Chinese stepping into the coral and breaking it, we told the hotel staff and they didn’t care, they were busy singing and having fun at the reception. Before snorkelling I asked if they had beer, they told me yes and I told them to reserved two for us. At dinner time, again when we arrived to the lobby, the attitude of the staff was unfriendly. I asked for two beers and they brought us the only two beers they had and they were hot as hell. If they had told me that I would had bought them before and bring them to my refrigerator’s room, I told them that and again they laughed at my face. We decided not to have dinner because of the situation they put us. We were very angry and disappointed. We went back to the room and had some nuts and water. Afterwards some staff came to room apologising for they behaviour, inviting us to have some diner. They did that because we wrote Cumie to tell her about the multiple incidents. However , they apologise weren’t sincere. This people don’t care about customers, they are used to Chinese customer screaming and behaving wrongly with the environment. I would not talk about the room and hotel conditions because I have been much worse places but we paid a lot for the room and service.The room is filling apart and filthy. I attached pictures. The hotel is not cleaned . We found in the morning food in the reception from the prior dinner. We left the hotel not having breakfast because we did not want to deal with staff again. In a nutshell,...