Sun Outdoors Marathon — Hotel in Marathon

Additional UPDATE: we stayed here again this year (July 2025) and had a great experience. We rented one of the vacation rental homes and loved it. It was clean, spacious and exactly what we needed for our family of 4.

Everyone at this campground was very helpful and friendly. We did not use the campground shower/bath house so I can’t speak to those but everything else was well kept.

They have a very nice boat slip area and fish cleaning station. Our kids enjoy watching the baby nurse sharks when the fisherman would come in. The outdoor seating area is perfect for catching the sunset and the community center is great for having dinner with a group.

We have traveled through the Keys from top to bottom and Marathon is the ideal location. You are close to all the stuff that we enjoy.

We have already started planning our next trip and Sun Outdoors Marathon will be our go to place to stay!

UPDATE: Sun Outdoors has stepped up to try to correct the issues we had so I raise the rating to 3 stars. Thanks for your help Sun Outdoors.

We spent 5 nights here last week (July 2024). Our initial contact with them on the phone was great and we were really excited for our stay.

We showed up at 3pm on Saturday. The office was closed and locked but thankfully we found a maintenance man that let us in to get our site info.

I paid for half the stay over the phone and asked to pay the remainder in cash. After 2 days of trying to catch someone in the office to make our cash payment, they done an unauthorized withdrawal from my account for the remaining amount. I had cash in hand but can’t pay if no one is around to take the money.

The campground had a near constant smell of sewer. I don’t know what was causing it. It would come and go but when you could smell it, it was very strong.

One day while showering in the bathhouse the sinks started backing up and overflowing into the floor. Then all 4 sinks stayed nasty the rest of our stay.

The men’s bathroom only has one toilet and then a hole in the floor where another one once was.

On our first night there was a camper just down from us that was blasting music and then another camper riding around blasting music on a golf cart at well after 1:00am. We had to be up at 6 the next morning for a reservation we had. Quite time is listed at 11pm but is not enforced.

Also, the sewer hook up for our camper was about 25ft away, on the other side of our camper and up hill.

On a positive note, the laundry room was nice and it is in a great location and the maintenance man was super nice and basically the only employee we seen.

This is our first experience at Sun Outdoors and might be our last. Sun Outdoors please reach out if you’d like...

We reserved a room for 5 days. We called ahead of time because we weren't going to make it during their business hours. They left a key for us since we arrived at 11pm. Once we walked in the room, I looked over things to make sure it was clean. Sadly, the bed looked like the sheets had not been changed. They were covered in pubic hairs and some sort of bugs, which I refused to sleep with. Also the bathroom was not very clean with little trails of hairs too. I am not extremely nit picky but when there is more than one or two hairs and they are every where, it doesn't seem clean to me. Since it was 11pm we could not request a change of sheets for the night. So we grabbed our blankets and pillows from our vehicle to sleep on. Since we had to "modify" our bed due to the unclean sheets, it was very uncomfortable. Woke up the next morning and went to the car for something. While outside we ran into the housekeeper, which asked if she could get us anything. We told her about the sheets and she immediately got an attitude. She was telling us that there was no way the sheets were dirty and kept running her mouth. She seemed very argumentative with the customer, which whom is supposed to be right in business satisfaction. She came in our room and I pulled the sheets back, she started telling me that there were stains on the sheets from the washing machine. I told her I wasn't worried about rust stains from the wash, it was other people's body hair and bugs that I refused to sleep on. She immediately left the room and went to tell the shift manager, who told her to come back and tell me that we "could leave if we wanted to cause they weren't changing our sheets every single day"... I nicely told her that we weren't worried about changing our sheets every day and if that was MY hair there wouldn't be a problem but I wasn't sleeping with someone else's hair and some kind of bugs. She finally changed the sheets but did so with such an attitude that if I had my own sheets I wouldn't have even bothered. We put a "do not disturb" sign on our door for the rest of the week so that we didn't have to come in contact with these disputatious people. *They tell you that you can leave because they know that there isn't any where else in the keys available at that time because everyone else is booked. To me, that is very poor management. You should work with your customer, not argue and not try to push them out because of YOUR poor cleanliness. Needless to say, we will NOT ever stay at this...

We enjoyed our time at Sun Outdoors Marathon but there were a few things that would have improved our stay:||We stayed in a vacation rental and there weren’t any real instructions checking in such as you will only get 1-2 rolls of toilet paper and paper towels for your week long stay. You need to buy anything more at a store?! That seems so odd and I’ve never run into that before. ||We thought our rental had a washer and dryer in the unit-that’s what the pics included. Ours had the hookups but no units and apparently some have them some don’t. Would have been nice to know ahead of time. No change machine in laundry facilities and office hours are minimal (close at 1pm on weekend?!) so had to make run to store for quarters and the laundry was quite expensive (from other RV resorts we have been to). Also was told we were responsible for washing own towels which I thought was odd spending our own money and detergent to wash towels at a rental? We were allowed to exchange our towels for clean ones but was informed this was not usual and needed to wash them ourselves next time. ||Nice to have the free showers because the water heater in vacation rental was super small and ran out 1/2 way through 1 shower. Would have like to have the bathrooms cleaned much more-same disgusting toilet for 1 week and had to constantly clean hair clogs from showers. Resort didn’t seem to have enough workers to tend to things other resorts do. Sign said bathrooms were cleaned daily at a certain time but I never saw any cleaning (even at the specified time) and it was quite evident.||Staff I interacted with were very nice and the location was great (being in middle of keys). We enjoyed our time but just some constructive criticism as I would have loved to rate as 5/5...