STAY AWAY!
Written: Jan 02 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fairly new, very eye-pleasing, great views.
Cons: POOR to little service, really not completely cleaned between guests, noisy appliances, paper thin walls.
The Bottom Line: Stay away if want to spend your vacation worrying about the park lines rather having towels in your room!
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| camuldoon's Full Review: Westgate Palace |
Looks can be deceiving. At first glance, Westgate Resorts is beautiful. Marble look countertops and some floor areas, expensive looking furniture, dishwasher, washer and dryer, TVs in all rooms, Jacuzzi tub, clear glass showers, etc. Very nice, nice touches with fake plants, etc. Everything appears to be wonderful.
Then you have your day that you have to talk to a representative about purchasing a time share unit. They bring you in for breakfast and an advertised two hour time period to talk to the sales team. The breakfast consisted of cold eggs, congealed sausage, stale bagels and dried out pastries. Then you get moved to a special room where you have a special sales rep that is there JUST for you! The price started out around $29,000 for a timeshare with Westgate Resorts with all these wonderful specials. The rep pulls out a photo album with tons of celebrities that have had their picture taken with the ‘developer’ of Westgate Resorts. David somebody or other. I wasn’t impressed, and have no idea how real the photos were. We have now been at this presentation for about an hour or so.
We tell the rep we are not interested. Okay, so he drops off one or two of the special ‘other places’ you can use the timeshare, and suddenly, the price drops to $18,000. Okay, I don’t know about you but if you are going to sell me something and you start dropping the price dramatically with little reason, I am going to be very wary about even considering this property, let alone seriously think about purchasing! So, this goes on until the property is down to around $10,000. We are still not interested and tell the rep. In the middle of all this, we are left alone so the rep can go get his manager to offer the last special of 10 grand. Whatever. About this time, the sales rep realizes that he is not going to get a sale, and suddenly is totally disinterested in us, stops smiling and says someone will be over to talk to us then we can go. We now have been here for over two hours and knowing that the kids are waiting for us to take them to one of the parks, we are getting anxious and just want to go.
The someone turned out to be another sales rep that is now going to sell a week’s vacation that we can pay for, by credit card, on an installment plan and it gives us the opportunity to stay at several (but not all) of their many resorts. We still said no. We have been here now for over three hours.
Now, however, the kids (teens) call on our cell and they have locked themselves out and are getting antsy to go. So then the sales rep goes full force on us and just to be able to leave and get them off our backs, we agree to the one week stay at a later date. One of us leaves to go get the kids taken care of bring them back and hopefully be ready to go.
By the time we got through that paperwork and everything else, we had been there for almost five hours. Two hours, my foot…….it was close to FIVE! And we still weren’t comfortable with the purchase we had made.
Okay, fast forward to two years later and we are going to book the room. Well, the paperwork is quite vague as to what the time frame is for booking the room. AND everyone you call and talk to tells you something different. Seems that if you go over the 27 that really says a 35 month period, that there is a $200 fee to extend it one year. Okay, well we only needed it extended for 6 months, so can we pay $100? Several no’s, finally someone says they can do it, so we finally are going to book the stay. Sounds simple, right? Nope, then I had to pay extra for another bedroom because the place that we wanted to stay didn’t have one bedroom suites, although the paperwork we had said that was one of the resorts we could stay out. Ugh. Okay fine, we’ll pay to upgrade to a two bedroom. Oh, sorry, the dates you want are not available. Okay, that’s the only time we can go, what can we do. Oh we have a new building that we can put you into with brand new rooms. Two bedroom? Yes, with paying $100 for an upgrade to two bedrooms, because, see, they don’t have one bedrooms there, either. Fine.
So we finally get to the Resort – Westgate Palace – 16th floor – absolutely awesome view – can see all of Wet and Wild, most of the strip and parts of Universal. Cool. Nice room, looks clean, no problem. Yet.
The master bedroom in the suite had the sinks for the bathroom behind the door. You had to close the door to use the sinks. Moving the door to other side would have solved that problem. Strange design. Okay, we can live with that, just shut the door.
Swept the floor and found what appeared to be animal hair on it. Funny thing is though, pets are not allowed. Hmmmm. Then looking up at one point, notice that most of the light fixtures are covered with cobwebs. Okay, as long as they stay there.
Notice we had no face/wash cloths. Called down they were going to bring them right up. Had to call three more times before we got them. After four days, they change out your all your towels. That’s okay, we were washing them anyway, so no biggie there. EXCEPT, they took all the towels out of the room, and left only clean hand towels. We found this little gemstone out after coming in around 10pm. Called the front desk, and they said someone would be right up with some and how many did we need. No one ever showed up that night. I called housekeeping the next morning and someone brought some up about a half hour later.
Dishwasher was so noisy that we could only run it when we went out. Oh, and the dishwasher is placed right in front of the sink. You have to be on the side leaning over to take dishes out of the sink and put them in. To put them away, the cupboard was also directly above the sink and the dishwasher. You had to basically open and close the dishwasher door to put dishes in or take them out!
Dryer never really dried the clothes. I think we had a small load of shirts and t-shirts in there for three hours. Towels, forget it…..one or two at a time and that was it! And noisy. We don’t have the best in the world at home, but even they are quieter!
Paper thin walls, seemingly so, anyway. We could hear the conversation in the room beside us. The people in the other room could have laid in their beds, us in ours and had a conversation! You heard everything and anything that happened in the hall. You could hear the people in the room across the hall, and they were not yelling – it was normal speaking voices.
There were other minor issues, that with a suite / hotel of the caliber that they advertise, you would expect expert and timely service. Just not so. It took two days, several promises over the phone before someone finally came up and fixed our safe, too. Yes, we have stayed in rooms with far less than this one had, but we paid far, far less money than we did for this one. The service just was not there for a hotel like Westgate Resorts advertises itself to be.
They have some deal with a local pizza/Italian delivery place. Every couple of hours, someone slides their little menu under the door. Not once a day, not even twice a day but several times a day. So one night we order from them. They short us a sub. Call, and they are going to send it right over as soon as the driver comes back. An hour later we still have no sub, call again and they are going to bring it right over. We never got it and yes, we paid for it.
After our first experience with Westgate Resorts, I then had the time to do some research online and was appalled and surprised to find out how many other people have been taken unawares by this company and the people that work for it. I wish I had looked them up first.
Warning, if you like your money and you value simple service, stay away from Westgate Resorts.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
camuldoon
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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