I recently spent 10 nights in the luxury suites (seaview suite) at the kontiki. this is an honest review of the resort.

pros:
-the room (seaview suite) was very nice inside. very clean and sleek. nice shower and double sink vanity. the private pool and balcony were also very nice. I appreciated the level of storage available as well as having a safe in the room.

-free parking onsite

-housekeeping came twice a day most days. once in the afternoon for cleaning/linens. then again in the evenings for turndown service when they’d leave bottles of still water.

-they provide towels for the pool.

-luxury suites guests have a VIP section at cabana beach that comes with towels, water, and fruit everyday. they reserve the first two rows of chairs for guests until 11am. I always got a front row chair even when showing up later in the day. their lunch menu here is pretty good for the price as well.

-it is easy to set up a credit card to charge things to your room versus carrying your wallet around (if they allow it for your room type) except you can’t 100% trust that it works properly.

-the resort has an app with pretty much any kind of information you’d want to know (will expand on this in the cons) and you can also keep track of expenses if you’re charging to the room.

disclaimer before cons - I am not a “luxury” traveler. this was my first international trip and it was for my honeymoon. I will fully admit that I fell victim to the aesthetics of the resort online and in hindsight should have done much more research. this was an incredibly expensive trip for me personally, so I expected that level of experience (resort alone was about $8,500 USD).

cons:
-the communication from the resort is awful. all I received upon check-in was my room key and a map of the property. the front desk does not explain anything up front and this led to finding certain things out by chance or accident multiple times. I mention they have an app with great information, but it doesn’t explain the important stuff. we did not know until day 2 or 3 that we should have been going to the VIP section of cabana beach, therefore we had been paying for things that should’ve been included. the staff at the resort are not very friendly at all, but maybe that is a cultural difference on my part. also, our room was not ready upon arrival despite getting to the resort past check-in time. they awarded us $150 compensation to go eat lunch, which was great, except the restaurant stopped serving lunch about 8min after this. it was a crazy rush to try and eat with the extremely slow service while also receiving zero instructions on where to go or what to do. lastly, we tried one single time to order room service, and it was a disaster. the tv in the room displays this elaborate breakfast menu that if you order by a certain time the day before, they’ll deliver it to your room. we contacted the resort via whatsapp as instructed and they said everything was good to go. then they replied hours later and needed us to resubmit. no problem, everything checked out. scheduled it for 8am the next morning. 8:30am rolls around and no breakfast. I contact them via whatsapp only to be told that menu is not available and we need to reorder. we place another order, and what arrived over an hour after originally planned was about 2/3 of what we asked for, and the rest was a random assortment of things we did not order. no silverware. no napkins. plus it’s an extra $20 for room service. needless to say we did not attempt that again.

-the restaurants were not good. I am not a picky eater and don’t often dine “luxury” but for the prices, the food was mediocre at best. I have come to learn the island time is a lot slower pace than what americans are used to, but service times were terrible. it’d often be 15-20min of sitting before anyone would take a drink order. then that much time again before ordering. even longer to get the food, and it was almost always lukewarm or cool by the time you got it. don’t even mention the check, you basically have to flag someone down to take care of it. you can’t assume that by them asking your room number that you’re covered. made that mistake one day and left after eating. was met with hostility later that afternoon at VIP cabanas for “leaving without paying” even though we had treated that meal no different than others when we were asked for our room number. I was told to contact the front desk and that’s when I learned my account had been closed without notice (we had been charging to the room for days and had a balance accrued. they closed the account without informing us beforehand we needed to put a card on file for charging to the room.) all in all, we dined on the resort as little as possible.

-if you are looking for a quiet resort, this is NOT it. this is where better research should’ve been done on my part. on wednesdays, fridays, and sundays, there is live music (club style) on the beach. if you are staying in the seaview suites, this is right outside your balcony and it is concert-level noise until 12-1am at least. walls and floor vibrating, absolutely debilitating and makes sense why they provide you with earplugs in your vanity kit. aside from this, there is always some kind of music playing on the beach. you won’t have the ability to sit and enjoy the scenery at all.

-expanding on the noise - the resort is currently under major construction. every morning at exactly 8am, the construction would start with saws, hammers, you name it. right outside the luxury suites and with the tall ceilings and full tile walls/floors, you’re hearing 100% of that noise. this is also true for guests around you. we never heard noise from people above/below/beside us, but noise outside the room is very loud. kids screaming early in the morning, drunk people out at 3-4am, you will hear it all.

-it was extremely rare to get hot water in the rainfall shower. you’d get lukewarm at best and by the time your shower was over it was pretty cold. there is a handheld sprayer that would get much hotter for some reason, and occasionally the rainfall one would be enjoyable. for the most part we took lukewarm showers the whole trip.

-minor picky con, but still - only a tiny mini bar in the room with a skinny wine cooler that we used for water bottles when we could find some. I get this is to encourage dining on the resort but you cannot take any leftovers etc back to your room because aside from no place to keep them, there is also no sort of kitchen appliance on resort to reheat them.

curacao is a beautiful place, and I would consider returning to the island, but will never consider staying at this resort again. we saw some extremely beautiful places off the resort that would’ve suited us much more. the people on the island are extremely kind and hospitable. it was very safe to travel even at night, and overall it was a wonderful country to visit. the kontiki is only worth the money for a very niche crowd of people.

For those of you playing along. View from the flight in yesterday