My wife, daughter, eight-year old granddaughter and I recently returned from our third trip to Beaches (our first was in late 2022, our second in mid-2024). We enjoyed ourselves, and there are certainly good things to say about the resort, but overall I feel that a sense of diminishing returns is setting in. Perhaps if this had been our first trip I would rate it 5 stars, but given that it was our third, I would call it 3.5, rounded up to 4.
As I said, there are good things about the resort, most notably the very recent opening of a new village, Treasure Beach. In terms of physical attractiveness this is, even by the very high bar set by the rest of the resort (I am always amazed at how beautiful the setting is here), a gorgeous addition to the property, beautifully landscaped with a lovely pool. There is also a nice movie theatre with buttered popcorn. The new village also brings with it two major new restaurants: Butch’s Chop House and Pinta. Butch’s is a steakhouse that is a major part of the Sandals brand; this is the first one to appear at a Beaches. We all were very eager to try it out but when we did I found the experience underwhelming, perhaps because it was overhyped. My filet mignon was not bad but it wasn’t the stellar experience I expected it to be; I actually enjoyed the steak I got at Schooner’s with my steak-and-egg breakfast more. Butch’s is also open for breakfast, but this, too, was disappointing: my wife ordered a lobster omelet, for example, and got a shrimp one; she was told that lobster wasn’t in season anymore, so they just substituted shrimp. Why not just tell her that lobster wasn’t available and ask her what she wanted instead? Pinta, on the other hand, was better than I (or anybody in my family) was expecting. From the description, we thought it would be a food court, but instead it turned out to be (for lunch and dinner) a waiter-service restaurant where the menu was divided into multiple sections (Caribbean, Italian, Asian, Mexican) and you could order from each category (the waitress said she recommended one or two items per person). I had scrumptious plantains from the Caribbean section, good potstickers from the Asian, delicious elotes (seasoned corn on the cob) and carne asada from the Mexican, and tasty spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread from the Italian. There is a dessert buffet for lunch and dinner that chocolate lovers will enjoy. We wound up eating there twice for dinner, once for lunch and once for breakfast. For breakfast, there are two buffets: a traditional American one and a multiple-country one with interesting items like scrambled egg and bacon bao.
Another nice thing about the resort is the friendliness of the staff. It seems that every person we encountered greeted us cheerfully and always had a smile. I never met a single staff member who gave me the impression that he or she would rather be somewhere else.
Unfortunately, “friendly” does not necessarily translate into “efficient”. On numerous occasions things did not get done. The honey that my daughter was told would be delivered to her room for her daughter, who developed a cough while there, never showed up; she had to go out and get some cough medicine on her own. Routine meal items (steak sauce or drink refills, for example) were requested and never arrived. When things did get done, they sometimes took forever. We ordered burgers at Bobby Dee’s, for example, and I was seriously wondering whether they would arrive in my lifetime.
In addition to slowness, there were, for the first time since we have been coming to Beaches, several times when the resort was out of things. My granddaughter likes the “chocolate monkey” drink (chocolate syrup, milk, and a banana, blended together to form a shake) and on one occasion was told that she couldn’t get one because they were out of chocolate, and on another was told they were out of bananas. Seriously, how does a Caribbean beach resort run out of bananas? Also on the first day of our visit I was told they were out of Diet Cokes, so had to drink a regular one instead.
I also found myself annoyed at the frequent inability to get beach chairs. This resort has an obsession with butlers, who go out and reserve chairs (that are, it seems, often unused throughout the day). It is pretty frustrating to see a ton of unused chairs, all marked with towels, when you need one. This problem seemed particularly acute at the Italian Village pool, but was beginning to infect the Treasure Beach pool at the end of our stay.
Perhaps my biggest complaint about this trip, however, was the poor quality of basic internet service in the rooms. Given the very high prices Beaches charges (our room fees were much increased over what we paid in 2024), you’d think that they could provide internet service that was reliable, but that turned out not to be the case. In our room, our ability to access the internet even depended on what area of the room we were trying from. There is “enhanced internet”, for a fee, and I was wondering whether this was a subtle attempt to get people to pay for that.
There are more than 20 restaurants on site, which is good; some (like Bayside, Reflections, and Guiseppe’s) are buffet for three meals a day, others are off-the-menu. You can’t expect really gourmet food at an all-inclusive, and you won’t get it here, but the food was generally pretty good. For lunch and dinner we preferred off-the-menu places to buffets, but we did find the buffet at Reflections to be quite satisfactory for breakfast. Schooner’s does an excellent off-the-menu breakfast; the ambiance at Sky is nice but I thought the breakfast was only so-so. For lunch, my favorite places were Neptune’s, Pinta and Dino’s, which has not only good pizza but also sandwiches and burgers. I didn’t get a chance to do the Jerk Truck this time, but I seem to recall enjoying it on a previous visit. The smashburger at Bobby Dee’s wasn’t quite as good as I remembered it from previous visits, but the hot fudge sundae remains delicious (and you don’t have to wait for that). For dinner, I enjoyed the ribs at Arizona’s (there is also a good chocolate mousse cake for dessert, which you can get in a non-spicy version upon request), and as previously mentioned we all enjoyed Pinta a lot. Cricketer’s is a good place for lunch or dinner (and gets a rave review from our granddaughter, who swears by their chicken nuggets; they are good throughout the resort but they seem to be especially good here).
So, bottom line: the four of us had a good time and we’re certainly not sorry we went, but, especially at current prices, I’m not in any great hurry to visit Beaches in the near future.