Marriott's Frenchman's Cove — Hotel in Saint Thomas

TLDR summary: The scenery is beautiful, but this is not one of Marriott's best vacation club properties due to cleanliness, noise, and safety.||The Good: The views from the rooms are great and at night, the lights on the island hills are spectacular. During the day, Frenchman's cove is pretty and gives plenty to look forward to seeing. ||The beach is smaller in size, so you will not always have a private chair, but it was large enough for our family to enjoy and our toddler loved playing in the sand. ||The pool is also smaller, but it was large enough for us to enjoy, and the water slide was a fun addition.||The three bedroom timeshare gave lots of room to stretch out. The beds were very comfortable and the bedding was clean.||The staff is friendly ||The iguanas are huge and will come within good viewing distance of you. Our kid loved watching them and so did we.|||The Bad: I'm unsure if the first two of the following may be island issues and not specific to the resort or if this is correctable, but the hotel water is yellow. It isn't obvious at first glance, but If you take a bath or look in the toilet, you will see lots of yellow algae floating around. It was enough that the toilet always looked used and the tub had a prominent yellow ring. We bought gallons of drinking water from the store. ||The second possible island issue is that we encountered multiple roaches in the unit. We didn't leave food around and kept the place clean, but we'd still see them when we turned the lights on in the bathrooms or kitchen. I assume they may be coming from the drains, so for the rest of our trip, we kept our drain plugs in use when we weren't using the sinks or tubs. The hotel staff warned us that we would only have a single cleaning during our stay and it would only be to refresh towels and make the beds, which was fine. However, every day after that cleaning, they came by to do additional "cleanings". We noticed while we were out, that the fridge had been moved away from the wall and left in the middle of the kitchen. This was likely to spray for roaches. Someone else staying in the same building must have notified the front desk of the issue.||The roosters on the Island will wake you up at 6 AM every single day. ||There are three elevators to get to the beach/pool from the lobby level. The elevators made strange noises and shook on occasion. On our stay, at least one elevator required repairs. ||There are no garbage disposals in the units.|||The ugly: The floors of the units are absolutely disgusting. They must never mop the floors unless someone complains about them. If you walk around without shoes on, within 10 minutes, your feet will turn jet black. We complained and they sent someone with a mop down, but they never refresh the water they mop with even when it is black water, so all that happens is they push around the dirt and take off a slight layer of grime when they initially start mopping. These units need to be mopped MUCH more frequently and the cleaning staff should be trained to dump the water once it is dark in color. ||This one is really ugly.... They have off-road 4 wheel drive vehicles (not cars or trucks) that are used by the employees to get around the property. We saw on multiple occasions that some employees were going on joy rides through the streets by going 3 to 4 times the speed limit around blind turns where we cross the street with our child. They were accelerating so fast and taking the turns at such speed that you heard the tires squeal pretty loudly. There would be no way for them to stop in time if we crossed the street behind a blind turn with our toddler in tow. These people need to be reminded this is a family resort with young kids. |||The property is built into a cliff with a road very close to the rooms. You'll hear large trucks going up and down the road quiet often. They are very loud as they are either accelerating or have their engine brake on due to the steep terrain. |||This is specific to unit 832 which is a three bedroom, put it may also be true for 831 which was the other unit on our floor.... As this unit is directly beneath the lobby, we were constantly disturbed by the noise above. Every day you will hear a lot of doors and drawers slamming along with chairs moving and other less than ideal noise. This starts at precisely 7AM and goes until the late hours of the evening (Maybe 10 or 11 PM, I can't recall exactly). If they are setting up in the meeting room, which they used the first three days or our trip, you will hear them dragging metal chairs across the floors and out onto the balcony. You'll also here loud carts being pushed across the tile floors. All of that is unbearable/extremely loud and we had to call to complain and ask that at a minimum they limit the hours this takes place. It didn't help much as they needed to get it done for their training session and so we dealt with a toddler that would not stay asleep in his room. If you get this room, good luck!!!!!!||We had fun at the beach, but this will likely be our first and last time at...

Frenchman's Cove is a Marriott vacation club resort built into a hillside overlooking a beautiful bay near the ship port and close to Charlotte Amelie. The resort itself is very beautiful. The rooms are spacious and clean with full kitchens.

The views are spectacular. Being near the ship port means there's always beautiful ships to watch in the distance and you can catch a water taxi to the main pier for shopping and eating all day long.

The main pool at the resort is very nice, with a restaurant, market store and activity center close by. The beach is adequate, though with the problem noted below. For swimmers and sun bathers, there are 3 floating rafts. There's a long pier where water taxis and other boats dock with benches.

The resort has a variety of food options for lunch/dinner, many reasonably priced, including several buffets. The rooms also have full kitchens as mentioned earlier for making your own meals.

Those are the good points of the property. Unfortunately, there are also some negative points. I understand mosquitoes, ants and sand flies are inevitable in the islands. See picture of the notice in the rooms attached. However, there are environmentally friendly, non chemical, ways to reduce the insect populations that can and should be used. Other properties are using them so why isn't Frenchman's Cove or why not more effectively?

The sand fly sign in the rooms says there is delayed agitation of the bite area and the irritation lasts for a few hours. However, our bites have been itchy, inflamed and painful for days. To us these bites feel more like fire ant bites, if fire ant bite irritation lasted DAYS. No medication or treatment applied has reduced or eliminated the pain, burning and irritation.

Perhaps, some people are more alergic than others? Regardless, a trip to the beach should not result in numerous bites on hands, arms, legs and feet. And yes we thoroughly applied both sunscreen and insect repellent prior to leaving our rooms. It's also worth noting that we've stayed elsewhere in the Virgin islands and this has never happened before.

Smoking can also be a problem on property. Frenchman's Cove, like all Marriott's, is non-smoking with designated smoking areas. However, as with all Marriott's, a few smokers think they can do whatever they want whenever and wherever they want. They smoke in the rooms, on the balconies, while walking around property, on the beach at night, etc. This makes life difficult for those with asthma and respiratory issues who like my family came to the islands to get away from all the smoke and pollution back home. It really sucks to have to reach for an inhaler all day every day after encountering someone's smoke. Vacation was supposed to have been a break from that.

While talking about pollution. Let's talk about noise pollution. Marriott needs better policies regarding music on the beach and at the pools. Someone's quiet music is okay, if distracting from the serenity of the islands. Music played by the band or performer hired by Marriott is okay. What's not okay is when someone blares their music at an uncomfortable volume, whether during the day or night at the pool beach side or dock.

Part of the problem here at Frenchman's Cove is that staff is rare to be found on the beach/ dock areas and everyone knows this. In 7 days, the only times I saw staff in the beach,/dock areas is when there were official activities or at start/end of day when they were tidying up.

To avoid problems,.staff should be more present. Staff should also be present when the sunset cruise returns, as there were recurring/ repeat problems at this time in...

We split our time on St. Thomas — 3 nights at the Ritz Carlton Club and 3 nights at the Marriott Frenchman’s Cove. Booked both through MVCI. Here’s how they compare. ||Ritz Club - |Cons: |- They are unfortunately dealing with a seaweed problem. It washes up onshore and decomposes. They have a barrier and actively remove it, but it persists. We did smell it the first couple of days but less so the 3rd. There were not many people in the water. We are more pool than beach people so it didn’t impact our stay. |- We liked the 2BR room layout. The rooms were a little dated, but they are about to close the whole resort for renovation. |- We cancelled our reservation at Alloro on property because the reviews were very bad. (The food service is operated by a 3rd party, not the Ritz)||Pros: |- More horizontal property, meaning it was spread out and it seemed like every room was ocean view. Our room, while only on the 2nd floor, had a great view of the serenity pool and beach. |- You can walk next door to the Ritz Carlton hotel for an additional pool and another poolside restaurant. |- We rented a cabana at the hotel side and it was beautiful. With a sofa, TV, prosecco, fruit, cookies and meal and drink service. |- Pools were not crowded at all. We could have easily secured lounge chairs in the afternoon (this is August). |- Red Hook was about 10 minutes away with great places to eat. We recommend Hook’d for dinner and Moe’s for groceries. ||Marriott Frenchman’s Cove ||Cons -|- Property is more vertical. It’s pretty and colorful in the pictures, but what it means in reality is… |- We were in the upper building (St. John). Yes, our room was ocean view in that we could see the ocean in the distance. But we immediately overlooked the road between the buildings and the roof of the next building. We could not see the pool or the property’s beach. (Chairmans’ Club owner but we do not own here and stayed only 3 nights. Guessing we were lower priority to some others, which is fair). So tip is to definitely ask to be in one of the other 3 lower buildings. |- Getting from our room to the pool required taking 3 elevators. So because of these things, we felt a bit removed from the pool & beach. It felt like more effort to pack up and go down to the pool. ||- There are other properties nearby where you can go to their restaurants or buy a pass to use the pool, but it’s not walkable via beach. The shuttle from the Marriott to the Westin is 1x per hour. The shuttle to the Buoy House is more frequent. |- We found it more challenging to grab a bite here since there is really one easily accessible option. |- So many bug bites. I didn’t feel them when they were happening (probably when I went to the beach as the sun was going down) but I sure have a lot of them. Bring and wear bug spray. |- Pool is rather small and was crowded. |- No cabana rentals||PRO’s ||- Great room, nice layout, updated|- Easy to get a cab, there is another Moe’s on this side of the island |- Food & drinks onsite were good |- Closer to the airport and the town where cruise ships dock, if that’s important to you |- Guest service both here and at the Ritz is outstanding. The pros / cons here are really more about the property |- They have night kayaking off the beach, which we plan to do tonight (wearing bug spray!)||For us, we preferred the Ritz experience, but perhaps our eating of the Marriott would have been different / better if we’d had a lower...