Tag: The House

A Tale of Two Resorts: One vacation, two experiences

A Tale of Two Resorts: One vacation, two experiences

There’s an old saying (very old―it dates from the sixteenth century) that we’re sure you’ve heard before: It’s an ill wind that blows no good, or as it was originally written: “An yll wynde, that blowth no man to good…” In some ways, we could say that about the last two years of seriously restricted travel because returning to travel has been a little like conjuring the excitement of doing something for the first time. Now that we’ve returned home from our winter sojourn in the Caribbean, we can tell you that we’ve been making up for lost time. As we told you in our last post, we had a three-part vacation. Let’s talk about the first two parts.

When the dust had settled on our cancelled Caribbean cruise and we put together our vacation, we decided we wanted to return to the islands, with the emphasis on the plural―islands. One would not be enough. Since both Caribbean stops were similar in that they were both low-rise, beachfront, adults-only properties, which included everything, it only seemed natural that we’d make comparisons. And we made lots. Let’s start this trip in Barbados.

We arrived at The House on the west coast of Barbados in mid-afternoon and were greeted by one of their onsite “ambassadors.” [For a few more details, we did introduce The House in our last post.] A thirty-four all-suite property, The House takes its name literally. We were led into the living room that opens to both the entrance and the beachfront to the rear. There is no reception desk, no concierge desk―only a living room furnished with comfortable couches and “ambassadors” who will attend to your wishes (when you can find one).

Our suite was exactly like the one we had when we were last here nine years ago, except we were on the ground floor this time. This location turned out to be excellent in that we could step out onto our lanai, then into the pool and onto the beach beyond. The suite is so pretty but the bathroom―let’s just say it was past its best-before date by some years.

The property is now all-inclusive, an amenity it didn’t offer nine years ago. Is this a good thing? Well, the food is not for foodies, but we enjoyed it. Last time around, we took advantage of the wonderful restaurants dotting the west coast of Barbados. We stayed on the property this time, eating all our meals in the living room/dining room and at Positano, the Italian restaurant attached to the property. This was actually a good thing, though, because the COVID restrictions are (were in February 2022) in full force. There were interesting (if limited) buffets on some evenings, à la carte offerings on others. The lunches were the best of all.

The property is quiet, populated with mostly older guests hailing from Britain. There may have been a few Americans―we didn’t hear any. And there was a smattering of Canadians. There are only thirty-four suites, though, so there weren’t many people at all.

The House cat and a sunset glass of Mount Gay XO

If we are being honest (and making a comparison), the beach and pool deck services were a bit spotty. It depended on which staff member happened to be working that day. Some were wonderful―others not so much.

So, what do you do at a property like this one? It’s quiet, and that’s what we wanted, frankly. But we also walked a few kilometres north and visited the Limegrove Lifestyle Centre― a fancy-sounding name for a small mall with a few upscale retailers such as Cartier and Longchamp. Then there was a short run into Bridgetown.

Sadly, the capital does not appear to have weathered the tourist dearth over the past two years very well. We saw many shuttered shops and very few tourists at all. And everyone on the street was wearing a mask. So, it was a short stop, and we were back in a taxi and back to The House to enjoy the sound of the surf, a bit of relaxation and a really good glass of Mount Gay XO rum on the rocks. The House provided us with a QR code to book a COVID test that we’d need for our onward travel. A charming young doctor arrived at our suite on the last Saturday morning, completed our test and paperwork and then it was off to St. Lucia.

Getting to St. Lucia is a subject for a whole other day. Can you say privately chartered aircraft? Well, yes, we can (but that is for another post!). When we arrived in St. Lucia, we navigated the health requirements, which resulted in donning white bracelets reminiscent of hospital identity bracelets.

The bracelet

They signified to everyone that we were adequately vaccinated and negatively tested, and we had to wear them until we left the country. We hopped in the waiting transportation and headed off to The BodyHoliday for the next week.

We arrived at The BodyHoliday long before standard check-in time, so we had to stow our belongings in well-appointed lockers. Then we headed off to the beach and lunch. When the time came for us to get into our suite, it wasn’t ready. We waited and waited. At first, patiently, then after an hour and a half, not so patiently. Finally, a concierge staff member told us the truth―the reason we couldn’t access our room was that the previous guest (who was supposed to check out at noon) still hadn’t left at four p.m. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be that obnoxious, but there are those around. To make up for our wait, the executive housekeeper asked us if there was anything we wanted. Usually, in those situations, the answer is not really, but we did have something in mind this time. We asked for a bottle of a very high-end St. Lucian rum we’d wanted to sample. A bottle of the not so high-end version arrived that same day, and a bottle of Forgotten Cask arrived the next day. Bliss on a balcony overlooking the beach!

Then, there was a lovely surprise. The first evening we arrived back in our room after dinner, the room was serviced and there was a tea tray with tiny biscuits. That chamomile tea helped us to drift right off. Every evening thereafter, another tea tray magically arrived with a different herbal concoction every evening. such a nice touch!

What about the resort, and how does it compare to The House. First, it’s larger. It’s not a high-rise, but it does have over two hundred rooms and suites, and it sits on a thirty-acre property which is so much larger than The House. Both are adults-only, but the guest demographic at The BodyHoliday skewed much younger. We expected that since this vacation can be a very active one with so many extras included.

One of the extras that we enjoyed daily was the included spa treatments. Each day you’re a guest here, you can have one of an extensive series of spa treatments, from massages to facials. We availed ourselves of the gamut. It’s possible to book these in advance, but we had a few issues with glitches in the online booking system and said to hell with it and left it up to them. When we arrived, we were each provided with a personalized schedule of daily treatments. We just had to get ourselves up the many steps leading up to the Wellness Centre to partake. It is worth noting that this may not be the spot for you if you have mobility issues. The property will provide an alternative lift up the hill, but the property itself isn’t really friendly to those who can’t walk a lot. There are lots of stairs and no elevators.

Unlike The House, one of the highlights was the food. As a rule, we’re not buffet-lovers, but the buffet at the main restaurant was quiet and extremely well-provisioned. As you can imagine, since this is a wellness holiday, there is an emphasis on healthy food. Every dish on offer had a small placard beside it indicating its content. For people who have chosen to restrict their diets in one way or another, it would have been heaven. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free etc.―they were all available. We don’t go for that kind of restriction, so we just enjoyed sampling many new dishes. The stand-out lunch was the Indian buffet.

The property has one onsite special restaurant they call Windows. A couple of times a week, they turn the buffet areas of the main restaurant into a special, reservation-only space that is advertised as something special. When a server asks Patty to reuse her fork―not once, but twice―there is nothing fine dining about it. Reusing cutlery? Not unless we’re at a low-end diner. It didn’t live up to its hype, and we’d definitely give it a miss the next time.

Then there was the spa. The Wellness Centre on the top of the hill above the beach and restaurant area was all we hoped it would be. It was beautiful, quiet, meditative and Zen-like and offered some of the most enjoyable treatments. We also consulted with the onsite Ayurvedic doctor, and that was worth the extra money we spent, if only for its entertainment value.

The view down to the beach from the Wellness Centre and the BodyHoliday property

Then there were other activities on offer. In fact, there were so many that they had to give us a booklet when we checked in. Yoga and Pilates classes. Meditation classes. Scuba diving lessons and dives. Snorkelling. Hobie craft sailing. Paddleboarding. Windsurfing. Tennis lessons. Golf lessons. Aquacise classes (those were very popular in their activities pool which was separate from their pool for leisure swimming and sun-bathing). And the list goes on. It was exhausting just reading it. But the good news was you could select to do as much or as little as you like. We enjoyed exploring the walking trails on the property and relaxing to the sounds of the ocean waves in Cariblue Bay, the little bay that The BodyHoliday has all to itself.

When it was time to leave, the concierge made us an appointment with their onsite nurse, who did our COVID tests and paperwork so we could move on to the third destination on our multi-layered vacation.

So, how did these two Caribbean, adults-only, low-rise, all-inclusive properties compare in the end? Well, there you have the similarities: location in the Caribbean, guests restricted to adults, no high rises and everything included. Everything else was different.

Despite our penchant for smaller resorts (we suppose that by most people’s standards, The BodyHoliday was small, The House minuscule), we preferred The BodyHoliday and would return in a nanosecond. But you do need to book an oceanfront room―not an oceanview. The oceanview rooms are much higher up the hill, away from the sounds of the surf. But, of course, they’re cheaper!

We have a great story to tell about our trip between islands. Stay tuned!

If you have a few minutes and would like to see what these two resorts are all about, here are the two video tours we made for you.

Our return to The House in Barbados
Our first visit to The BodyHoliday

Dust off Those Passports: First (almost) Post-COVID Trip

Dust off Those Passports: First (almost) Post-COVID Trip

When we returned home from our winter getaway in early March of 2020, we could see the handwriting on the wall. With our medical backgrounds (Art’s forty-five years as a family physician helped), it was clear that the impending pandemic would put a damper on international travel for some time to come. We immediately cancelled our planned and booked Northern European adventure and settled in to ride out the travel restrictions. It never occurred to us at the time that it would be a full two years before we left the country again! But it finally happened.

Passports dusted!

In mid-2021, in a burst of optimism, we booked a two-week Caribbean cruise on Seabourn’s Odyssey, including three days before it in Barbados and three days after the cruise in St. Martin, then a few days in Florida to round it out. We had our flight to Barbados scheduled for early February 2022 booked and paid for. By October, when the final payment for the (expensive) cruise was due, we looked at the international situation and considered our options. Then reality struck―and it had nothing to do with COVID.

Facebook might have its shortcomings, but occasionally, you can stumble on a valuable piece of information. Patty trolls the cruise groups from time to time and happened to join a Seabourn group. One of the members posted about cancelling their cruise because they wouldn’t be permitted off the ship in many ports or only in a Seabourn shore excursion group. Well, that wasn’t going to happen for us. The thought of being stuck on a small ship―or even a larger ship―for two weeks (regardless of the high-quality service) or worse, stuck with disembarking only with other people was a non-starter for us. For us, a Caribbean cruise means taking a luxurious ship as transportation between islands where we like to meander off the ship in our own time and explore―alone. With the spectre of a group thing for weeks on end (never mind that COVID was still raging), we called our travel agent and cancelled. But we asked her not to do anything with the flights as yet. There were many moving pieces, but there was still hope.

First, we extended our three-day stay in Barbados to a week and booked a fully refundable ticket to St. Lucia (refundable because we had an idea for a personal charter―we’ll get to that in a later post). And why St. Lucia, you might ask? As it happens, we had spent our honeymoon thirty-five years ago in St. Lucia and hadn’t been back except for a few day trips off a ship. There is also a resort we wanted to discover, so we booked a week at the BodyHoliday, changed our original flight from St. Martin to Miami to St. Lucia-Miami, and extended our stay in Florida so we could leave our return flight as is. So, how did it go?

Marvellously! Notwithstanding the COVID hoops we had to jump through every time we changed locales, things could not have gone better.

The island of Barbados!

That first moment when we walked off the Air Canada flight in Bridgetown, Barbados, into the sultry heat of the Caribbean sun, we knew we had made the right decision not to put off our travels any longer. We had learned another tidbit of information from a FB site: Enterprising Barbados businesses were offering a “fast-track” service through Grantley-Adams airport. So, we booked the Five Star Fast Track service, paid in advance and were met before even entering the immigration hall by a lovely and personable, bright-pink-and black-clad woman who led us directly to another door where our QR codes indicating we had uploaded all our health documents (vaccination and PCR test results) to the Barbados government app were scanned. We then proceeded to the immigration desk, where there was no line and then through to pick up our bags. Our escort accompanied us the entire way to the waiting sedan we had also booked through fast-track services.

A half-hour ride up the coast to St. James Parish took us to The House, where we planned to stay for a week. It had been nine years since we last stayed at The House for a few days before a cruise.

We chose this property first and foremost because it is adults-only. It also has only thirty-four all-suite accommodation. The icing on the cake was that it is now owned by Marriott, where we enjoy Lifetime Platinum status, and this stay would award us points (although to date, we have not received them. Yet another story.)

The House has an interesting concept. There is no reception lobby, no concierge desk. There is a massive “living room” open to the air at both the front and the back, which also houses the dining area.

The living room at The House

We are greeted by an “ambassador” who plies us with rum punch (or anything else we want) and tells us what we can expect.

We take our key cards to our oceanfront suite on the main floor with its lanai just off the hot tub and find our luggage already there. You might wonder―as did we―whether it was a good idea to be on the main floor so close to “the action.” We had little to fear. Given the age and decorum of the guests (primarily British, thank heavens), there was no “action” to be found, only a Zen-like atmosphere and loads of relaxation.

Unlike on our last visit when we sampled the many options for fine dining on this part of the Barbadian coast, The House had become one of Marriott’s very first all-inclusive resorts. It seems that when they acquired Elegant Hotels a few years back, with its several Barbados properties, they added this amenity. Was it worth it? Well, it’s not a place for foodies, but we found the dining options very enjoyable.

Not much else has changed in the nine years since we first stayed there. The suites are still exactly the same as were the bathrooms, which need a serious upgrade. There is much to love about The House, and we will go back―after they do a renovation! We’ll tell you more when we compare the two resorts we visited on this trip in a near-future post.

Welcome home: To ‘The House’ Barbados

The rainbow view from our varandah at The House.
The rainbow view from our verandah at The House.

Once upon a time, whenever you landed on a tropical island in the Caribbean in the middle of a long, cold, northern winter, you emerged from the plane into the bright sunshine, quickly feeling enveloped by the warmth of the breeze.  You breathed deeply and immediately began to feel relaxed as you walked down the steps to the tarmac, rather than into an enclosed jet way.  These days, with the airport improvements being enjoyed by the islands, this is a less common experience unless you’re traveling inter-island on the Caribbean’s own airlines in tiny planes.  But there are some hold-outs.

Despite modern improvements, landing in Barbados a few weeks ago was still like the old days: we walked down those steps and into the terminal building, knowing at once that we were indeed on vacation.It’s been only two years since we were last in Barbados, when we stayed for three days at the Crane on the Atlantic coast en route to a cruise.  And since we rarely like to repeat experiences, we decided that this year we’d try a property on the west coast, in an area that tourist brochures refer to as Barbados’ “Platinum Coast” in a property simply known as “The House.”  The final detail that moved us in this direction was when Patty read on their web site that they are “adults only.”  At this point in our lives, that’s a real selling point! And with only 34 suites, this was a property that might just meet our needs.

We arrived at The House in the early afternoon, and were greeted warmly by a striking, immaculately turned-out woman named Vanita, whose precise function was not yet clear to us – but it soon would be.  She invited us in as one might invite a cherished guest into one’s personal domain.  She immediately made us feel at home by installing us into deeply cushioned sofas in the lounge which was open to the outdoors both at the front and at the back which led directly to the pool and the beach beyond.   We sipped rum punch, and she began to tell us about the property that would be our home for the next five days.  The House has no front desk, no bellmen, no line-ups, no request that is impossible.  What they do have is staff that is, to a person, there to help you with anything you desire.You see, Vanita was actually one of several personal concierges, and each of the employees was an ambassador.  Everyone from the bar-tenders to the wait staff could be counted on to answer questions and to assist us with anything at all – and they did.

As soon as we were ready, Vanita showed us to our suite on the second floor of the three-story building.  An oceanfront junior suite (all the ‘rooms’ are all suites), the room was more than adequate with its recent refurbishments that included a wonderful bathroom, fabulous terrace, and breathtaking views of the surf.  We knew that at least the suite would make us happy for five days!

The romantic lounge area in the evening.
The romantic lounge area in the evening.

But the service was what really impressed us.  We’ve often said that as discerning travelers who ourselves are in what can only be described as service industries (see our profile for details), we are focused on finding  those places – hotels, airlines, cruises – where service is of the utmost priority. From the included champagne breakfasts, to the dining at their restaurant Daphne’s, to the wonderful beach with a lounge chair and umbrella for everyone, to the fantastic company (most of the guests were British), this Property did not disappoint in any way.

One day as we sat in our comfortable, cushioned lounge chairs, bottles of water that had just been delivered by the beach ambassador at hand, two women approached us (all beaches in Barbados are public).  Evidently one of them had stayed in this hotel some years ago when it had a former incarnation.  She wanted to know if it had been turned into condos.  When we told her no, she asked, “It is reasonably priced?”

This is always a difficult question to answer, so Patty asked, “How would you define reasonable?”

“Under $200 a night?” she replied.

“Oh, well,” we said.  “Perhaps not, then.”

But for us it was – because even at these prices (and it is a bit expensive in the high season), the value is truly there.  It was a wonderful way to begin our three weeks in the islands.  And we are likely to stray from our usual approach to not repeating experiences: we will go back.  On to the Seabourn cruise next post.

The main entrance.
The main entrance.

If you’re interested in The House, their web site is http://www.thehousebarbados.com/ .