HELP! Plaza Resort Bonaire Gets Mixed Reviews

[DazedAndConfuzed]

Doing the boat dive, you think everybody in the resort are American, but when passing the bar, I realized practically eveyone there were dutch. Plus, on the last day, which I could not dive, thus had breakfast after 9AM, I realized there were alot of dutch people eating there that I never saw when doing early breakfast.

 

[gypsyjim]

We noticed both times we stayed at the Plaza, that the early breakfast was usually almost exclusively American divers, while a bit later in the morning the cafe was mostly filled with Europeans.

Some days it seemed almost as if there were two different resorts in one, with limited mixing between the groups. Some, but there were never anywhere near as many Europeans diving with us, even when boat diving as we saw around us in the resort, in the restaurants or around the pool.

 

[South4Scuba]

Wow! I never thought my thread would elicit 11 pages of comments. Thank you to everyone that has spent the time to respond. This has been a great "analysis" of Plaza Resort. I am now feeling only 50% queasy about my trip there (tongue in cheek!!).

It seems I'll have a great room in which I will be penalized for using too much electricty even though I'm paying an energy surcharge. There will be bugs in my room and mosquitoes outside my room. There will be no wash clothes, but I'm bringing my own. The boat diving is inconvenient and slow. Life is good.

On another topic, "How can you tell the Europeans from the Americans?" The Europeans will be the ones chain smoking cigarettes!!! It seems that lung cancer and socialized medicine are a perfect match . . .

And now for Hotel Cozumel. I am crushed that someone actually called my favorite place in Cozumel a giant Motel 6. I will admit that they leave the light on for me!! They have a basic scuba hotel with enough amenities to keep me occupied for a week of diving and the food is brown and hot. What more could anyone ask?

I have stayed at El Presidente and it is not worth $1,000 per person per week to get farther from town and have to pay cab fare everytime you want something to eat. Having said that, I am always open for hotel suggestions in Cozumel. Please, only those that are cheap enough that I feel good about my trip!!

I'm looking forward to a week of all-inclusive food and drinks at Plaza Resort. Worst case scenario, I will eat and drink myself happy!!

 

[Mike]

And now for Hotel Cozumel. I am crushed that someone actually called my favorite place in Cozumel a giant Motel 6. I will admit that they leave the light on for me!! They have a basic scuba hotel with enough amenities to keep me occupied for a week of diving and the food is brown and hot. What more could anyone ask?

I have stayed at El Presidente and it is not worth $1,000 per person per week to get farther from town and have to pay cab fare everytime you want something to eat. Having said that, I am always open for hotel suggestions in Cozumel. Please, only those that are cheap enough that I feel good about my trip!!

Why would you be crushed? If you've stayed at both the Presidente and Hotel Cozumel you're well aware of the differences between the two which is night and day. A $1000 a week more(which would be cheap if that's all it would cost you) gets you top notch customer service, a large beach, beautiful rooms, some with outside showers, tennis courts and a top notch spa and a great restaurant.

Now if that stuff isn't worth it, no problem, but get serious and let's get real about the differences. If they aren't important to you, so be it, but let's not act like Hotel Cozumel and the Presidente are identical except for the distance to down town.

Hotel Cozumel is a bargain hotel with a big pool, so-so generic food, hit and miss service etc. But as in everything in life, you get what you pay for. At $60 a night versus $500 a night I'd say 99.99% of people who stay at Hotel Cozumel vs Hotel Presidente do so based on their wallets, so let's keep it real and let's both agree if you're willing to pay what it takes to stay at the Presidente, you shouldn't be worrying about cab fare. That's like buying a Ferarri and crying about the low gas mileage it gets.

 

[vladimir]

Harbor Village sounds pretty five-star to me, though I've never stayed there as I found something more to my liking.

I wonder if there are any objective criteria attached to these star ratings?

I have stayed at Harbour Village four times, though not since 2007 (it would be a long flight from HK). If you compare it to, say, the Four Seasons in Bali, it would not do well. But you would be naive to expect that level of service and facilities in a small resort in Bonaire. Harbor Village has very comfortable, spacious suites. They include large, well-appointed bathrooms (double vanity, soaking tub that fits two, typical amenities like shampoo, conditioner, q-tips, etc., separate toilet area, separate shower area, and hand towels, I think--my fiancee will know), kitchenettes (microwave, small fridge, teapot), living rooms with convertible sofa and two or three large chairs, another toilet near the vestibule, a second anteroom on the beach side, ceiling fans and excellent air-conditioning throughout, and an outdoor lounging area with hammock, lounge chairs, overhead trellis, and a small table perfect for morning tea, or for drying wetsuits. In short, what you'd expect for $500--$600 a night. They will do your laundry, but it will take a day and a half. They will bring you room service, even though they're really not set up for it. In general, they will try to make your stay as pleasant as possible, so no attitude problems. It should be a given, but I have never seen a roach or rodent there. Gekkos don't bother me. The suites have always been impeccably cleaned.

La Balandra, the resort restaurant, has excellent food and an even better setting, jutting out into the strait on a jetty. It may be my favorite restaurant on the island, and I have tried most of the well-known ones. The menu is limited though, so you don't want to dine there too often.

The dive operation, Great Adventures, is good, because the boats are often sparsely occupied--sometimes you'll even get one to yourself. They run three dives a day--9:00, 11:00, and 2:00. They have two boats, so if there is a lot of interest they use the second boat--you will never feel like you're on a cattle boat. I am probably one of the few people who does a lot of boat diving in Bonaire. They mostly go to the same sites, but it's just too easy to drag your gear the 10 meters from the locker to the boat. I usually get a package that includes unlimited tanks and X number of boat dives, and often do my evening dive right out front, out of sheer laziness. That's what vacation is all about, isn't it? The diving directly out front is pretty poor, but if you do a little swimming you get to a decent site just to the south.

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

It seems I'll have a great room in which I will be penalized for using too much electricty even though I'm paying an energy surcharge. There will be bugs in my room and mosquitoes outside my room. There will be no wash clothes, but I'm bringing my own. The boat diving is inconvenient and slow. Life is good.

On another topic, "How can you tell the Europeans from the Americans?" The Europeans will be the ones chain smoking cigarettes!!! It seems that lung cancer and socialized medicine are a perfect match . . .

I'm looking forward to a week of all-inclusive food and drinks at Plaza Resort. Worst case scenario, I will eat and drink myself happy!!

There are little mosquitos in the room that we can never get rid of, must be due to the room service leaving the door open the whole time while cleaning the room.

Boat diving is not inconvenient. With us holding our own weights, there is no need to put them in the weight pockets, removing them from weight pockets every time we finish the boat dives, much more convenient if there are various weight stashed in trim weight pockets throughout the BC.

One doesn't have to bring one's own tank to the boat. For nitrox, one just measures the 02 content and leave the tank outside the nitrox tank room with your name on it and they DM will bring them into the boat.

Most of our boat dives went to Klein. Once they were heading toward north of the island, and I inquired if they had any wall dives, and stopped at a mini wall for me. There were some people who kept wanting to do Helma Hooker via boat. Did that on our 1 tank dive after the checkout dive, when they wanted to do it again a few days later, fortunately, 3 other boats were by its buoy so we did something else, so we went to do something else. Unfortunately, since we are in the south already, we had to dive there.

Many of their boat dives, the boat will drop us off at one dive spot and go to the next buoy to pick us up. This way, we will either do a slow drift dive or just swim with the current, never having to do the turnaround at half tank and swim into the current.

The small boats that we were on were decently fast. The total door to door time is always much less than doing shore dives either via their house reef or driving somewhere, where much of the time on shore dives are swimming out to the buoy and prepping gear before a dive or taking them apart after a dive, although the mosquitoes made us do some of the last 2 in record time.

As far as telling the Dutch apart from Americans, the dutch are thin platinum blonde ones that are over 6ft tall (men and women), while the American are the ones with the beer bellies. Your misconception of socialized medicine are way off. People of Netherlands were one of the shortest people in Europe a hundred years ago, but due to their post WWI 'socialized medicine', they have much better health and child nutrition, thus have grown much more vertically, as opposed to horizontally.

 

[Mossman]

I wonder if there are any objective criteria attached to these star ratings?

I have stayed at Harbour Village four times, though not since 2007 (it would be a long flight from HK). If you compare it to, say, the Four Seasons in Bali, it would not do well. But you would be naive to expect that level of service and facilities in a small resort in Bonaire. Harbor Village has very comfortable, spacious suites. They include large, well-appointed bathrooms (double vanity, soaking tub that fits two, typical amenities like shampoo, conditioner, q-tips, etc., separate toilet area, separate shower area, and hand towels, I think--my fiancee will know), kitchenettes (microwave, small fridge, teapot), living rooms with convertible sofa and two or three large chairs, another toilet near the vestibule, a second anteroom on the beach side, ceiling fans and excellent air-conditioning throughout, and an outdoor lounging area with hammock, lounge chairs, overhead trellis, and a small table perfect for morning tea, or for drying wetsuits. In short, what you'd expect for $500--$600 a night. They will do your laundry, but it will take a day and a half. They will bring you room service, even though they're really not set up for it. In general, they will try to make your stay as pleasant as possible, so no attitude problems. It should be a given, but I have never seen a roach or rodent there. Gekkos don't bother me. The suites have always been impeccably cleaned.

I believe there are some objective criteria depending on who's doing the rating. Still, we all weigh the criteria differently depending on what's important to us. I've stayed around the U.S., Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Europe in various types of accommodations ranging from flea bag to basic motel to cheap hotel to luxury hotel, so I use my past experience as a point of reference, tempered by the local environment. Often, the best place in town is lucky to rise to the cheap hotel category. Other places, like Bali as you mentioned, have a glut of luxury establishments all trying to out do one another.

As my wealth is limited, value is an important criterion to me. I've shied away from Harbor Village so far because, while I'm sure I'm love the room and the premises, the price just seems to steep for Bonaire. Unless luxury comes cheap, I'm happier staying in a "deluxe" category at half the price. If it's clean and kept-up, I don't mind going even cheaper down the scale. Buddy was a bit too far down the scale for me, as the bed sagged so much my back went out at the end of the trip, and a built-in sauna (aka the bathroom) wasn't what I had requested. Likewise with Capt. Don's the two times I stayed there, the last time we were forced to pay $200/night for a ground-floor "hotel room" that was extremely shabby inside, closer to the cheap motel category (but it was right at the pool). The only reason we did that is because J broke her ankle and couldn't make it upstairs to our Den Laman unit.

That last trip was sad. I stayed with J in the decrepit $200/night hotel room at Capt. Don's with its minifridge, while our $200/night lavish 1 BR condo at Den Laman sat practically unused (it became my photo studio for the few dives I managed to make). Every time I went back and forth, the difference was striking. Full kitchen with new modern appliances including a fridge with digital temp controls and through-the-door filtered water and ice, and a dishwasher. Impeccable cleaning. Large ocean-view balcony. Fully air-conditioned, not just the large bedroom, but the huge living-room and the bathroom and the kitchen too. Excellent security. Great restaurant downstairs. Bari Reef at your feet. Excellent value since it was the same price as our hotel room with worn carpet, old saggy bed, stains and nicks on the walls and furniture, weak A/C, and brown "potable" water from the faucets. But to be on the ground floor that trip, priceless.

(I had actually checked Harbor Village after her accident, but no ground floor rooms were available for the time span we needed. Plaza had a couple rooms available, but they were too far for her to get to on crutches and we didn't have the wheelchair yet. At Capt. Don's I borrowed one of the restaurant employees with a utility cart and we managed to wheel her right to the room door, so it worked out well after a very long and trying day.)

 

[Mossman]

As far as telling the Dutch apart from Americans, the dutch are thin platinum blonde ones that are over 6ft tall (men and women), while the American are the ones with the beer bellies. Your misconception of socialized medicine are way off. People of Netherlands were one of the shortest people in Europe a hundred years ago, but due to their post WWI 'socialized medicine', they have much better health and child nutrition, thus have grown much more vertically, as opposed to horizontally.

Are Europeans really so skinny because they're healthier or is it because they smoke so much?

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

Are Europeans really so skinny because they're healthier or is it because they smoke so much?

It is widely known that they are the tallest in the world, and due to "national health service that pampers infants":

USATODAY.com - Dutch reach new heights

Apparently, the idea of Europeans puffing away like a smokestack is a misconception, with much of western europe smoking less per capita than the US:

List of countries by cigarette consumption per capita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You might not see as much of it going on in coastal states, but it is prevalent in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi...the same states that has the highest rates of beer bellied bubbahs.

Obesity in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[FWADIVER]

I wonder if there are any objective criteria attached to these star ratings?

Star ratings dont really have anything to do with how good a hotel is, but with what services they offer. For instance its possible to find 3 start hotels that are nicer than 5 star, the main difference is if they have 24 hour reception and bilingual staff or not... see the wikipedia page on star ratings