Blue Bay Resort

We visited this hotel from January 2 to January 7, 2020, my girlfriend, our 21 month old daughter and I.

Let’s clarify an important thing right away. For an unknown reason, this hotel bears two names: Blue Bay Resort and Venice Sea View Hotel. At the entrance gate, you have one name on the left wall (Blue Bay) and the other (Venice) on the right one. From what we observed, this hotel is a lot more known to locals as Blue Bay than Venice. We reserved at the Venice Sea View, so we were a bit confused at the beginning.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. Mixed because the employees are genuinely nice hard working people, but to me, the direction doesn’t deliver for the price they are asking for their hotel.

Pros
- Well maintained landscaping around the property: this hotel is definitely a cut and paste of all inclusive hotels you can find in the Caribbeans. Lots of different trees with their names in front (in Chinese), beautiful flowers.
- The numerous pools in between the buildings were clean and in a relatively good condition. And fairly unoccupied which was nice for those using it.
- Smiley and hardworking staff. Special mentions to : Ro-Is and Sulhaimi (hope I write it well) the security agents at the gate and Loh the cart driver.

Cons
- Wear and tear in many aspects: rusty disgusting blinds (see my photo) covering the window between the bathroom and bedroom, stairs leading down to the pool mismatched, not always well fixed and metal structure nearly completely degraded by rust, old and noisy air conditioning system, and so on.
- The buffet area is dark and not welcoming at all. Even early in the morning when the buffet should be full and well presented, it seemed that it was left half ravaged by a bunch of hungry teenagers the day before. It really looked disgusting and we were glad we did not pay the additional 10$ CAD/person (on the website of hotels since on site it was nearly 25$ CAD per person!!!) when we reserved.
- The mattresses are very hard… and you should know that I travelled throughout Asia and that I appreciate firm mattresses… but that was nearly like sleeping on concrete. Plus, we had booked our reservations in July 2019 (like 6 months in advance) and had requested to have a king mattress instead of two simple mattresses next to one another (since the website mentioned depending of availability)… well let me tell you that 6 months prior to our visit, we were probably the first ones to request that and they succeeded not giving us a king mattress. When we complained, it really to a couple of calls and some argumentation to have them do something… but since the king mattress of the other proposed room (oh yes, forgot to mention that the hotel was half occupied so clearly, our request had just been « forgotten » or something) was as hard as what we had and that we would have need to repack and unpacked we decided to cope with their error and bad bed. The mattresses were so bad we were waking up as if we had done a Ironman the day before…
- The landscaping is weird in a way that the “tiles” they have used on the lawn do not permit to circulate easily with a stroller (see my photo) or with a wheeled luggage.

When we saw how nice were the Santhiya (that is where you want to be if you are already ok paying more than 100$ a night in Thailand… even if it is more than double de price than this hotel, should we have known, we would have booked it in a heartbeat) and BJ Radisson, my girlfriend contacted hotels because she wanted to cancel our last 3 nights to go at Santhiya… but since it was a bit complicated with the time remaining and the baby, we accepted a 130$ credit to compensated.

Overall, we do not recommend, we would not go back and we would not suggest taking the breakfast option if you plan to really go there (you can go eat at Hari’s Kitchen as from 9 am or that Together as from 10 am where you can have good omelettes made and delicious fruit shakes).

I stayed here 4 nights with some friends. ( between 30 December- 03 January 2020) The resort is very beautiful, but we had a few issues: in a double room they have only one soap...if you wanna wash you hands you have to take it from the shower :))
We wanted to spend the New Year’s Eve at the restaurant who is in front of the beach but 80% of the guests were chinese people and they were doing karaoke, they did this every night and you could heard them from 500m ( and I’m not exaggerating at all). We heard that the owner is a chinese guy and maybe he is giving them good prices. As a suggestion: fill the paper every night so you can eat something at the breakfast, because we forgot to do it one day and after all those people they were like after a war :))