Unfortunately, my first stay at Montage Laguna Beach will likely be my last. It was a disappointing experience overall, and I left without much confidence in the resort’s standards. While I was there, I tried to give feedback to a manager, but was told they were busy and would call me later. More than two weeks have passed, and I have not heard from anyone.
To begin with the positives, the cocktails at both the Lobby Bar and Mosaic were excellent. We also had genuinely good experiences with Sadie at the Lobby Bar and Kevin at Mosaic. If the rest of the stay had matched those interactions, this review would have been very different.
Dinner at the Loft was underwhelming. The table bread ranged from soggy to overly hard. The shrimp were good, but the steak was overcooked to medium and was a poor cut, with gristle and less flavor than I would have expected. The tuna tartare was bland. The pasta was the strongest dish, though the meat was unevenly distributed in the sauce. The lava cake was very good, but I did not think the accompaniments complemented it well. Service was professional, but it conveyed little genuine warmth. Nothing was overtly wrong, yet the interaction felt so strained that we left feeling more like an imposition than welcome guests. Most concerning, both of us woke up during the night feeling nauseous and spent significant time in the bathroom after that meal.
We did not risk another full meal at the resort until our last day, when we dined at Mosaic. The food there was much better: a great ceviche, a solid poke bowl, and an outstanding horchata crème brûlée that should not be missed. Most importantly, we both felt fine afterward. The service was also excellent. As we left, we found ourselves wishing that our experience there had been the standard throughout the stay.
The room had some strengths: the bathroom was well designed, the bed was extremely comfortable, and the view from the balcony was gorgeous. However, the cleanliness and maintenance were not at the level I would expect from a luxury resort. There was dust and human hair on the shower threshold, the TV was visibly dirty, and the throw blanket was stained. A bathroom floor tile was broken badly enough that I stopped to check whether it posed a hazard. The trim around the bathroom door was rotten and poorly patched, and there were paint splatters on the floor. Much of the furniture also felt surprisingly flimsy for a luxury resort.
Maintenance issues appeared elsewhere on the property as well. Chairs in the Lobby Bar were so wobbly that I initially hesitated to sit in them. Weather stripping was coming off the lobby balcony door. Paint had been slopped onto the glass tops of the balcony tables. In the gym, the handle to the large sliding glass door came off in my hand. By the second day, I had the impression of a property that was being kept presentable only at a surface level. When our TV malfunctioned on the second night, I was genuinely surprised that engineering was able to get it working.
Service was inconsistent. On the positive side, in addition to the staff members already mentioned, James in engineering, the managers Robert and Vincent, and Jayson at Mosaic were all helpful. Christy at the concierge desk was warm and genuinely helpful, and Debbie was also pleasant and sincere when I approached her with a question during our stay. However, many of our other interactions, especially at reception and with the concierge, were courteous in form but cold in effect, and left us feeling more tolerated than welcomed. Those negative experiences were persistent enough to shape the tone of the stay.
The concierge experience was especially poor. It took nearly 24 hours to return my initial call. When I followed up, I was routed into an AI-generated email exchange. One message even ended with the line, “If you’d like this formatted in a more formal concierge style… I’m happy to put that together.” A follow-up email contained factual claims paired with links that did not support them, strongly suggesting that AI-generated output had been sent without basic verification. Yet the correspondence was signed as though it had been personally written by the concierge. That was not the level of service I expected from a property of this caliber.
Overall, my stay at Montage Laguna Beach was deeply disappointing. There were a few standout employees and some good cocktails, but they were outweighed by the weak dining experience, cleanliness and maintenance issues, inconsistent service, and poor follow-through on guest feedback. I hope the resort improves, because in its current state it did not feel like a luxury experience.
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