Opinion re: Habitat Curacao

[sytech]

I am currently in Curacao after having spent nearly a week at Habitat Curacao. Here is my review.

The dive shop "Easy Divers" is pretty good. Need to descend 3 floors of stairs
several of which are broken. Saw a few people catch their sandals on the stairs and would have had a horrific fall had they not caught themselves. You can walk into the water off the pier by a short ladder. Clean up facilities are fine. Many of the wooden lockers are broken and the doors are barely hanging by their hinges. Many have exposed rusty nails. Now to the hotel.

The information you will see at the Habitat Curacao website is completely out of date and really misrepresents what a dump the hotel is. The "game room" is a hot and dusty dump of a room with a feeble internet connection which doesn't wortk a lot of the time. The room and most of the grounds are almost always mosquito ridden. The pool table is torn up.

Virtually all the equipment in their "gym" is broken. There are no "spa services" available. Much of the grounds are unkempt and not attended to. The TV has about 5 stations barely visible because of the bad reception.

Getting back to their Internet connection,Habitat is in a remote location. No I don't carry a laptop nor should I have to. I had to take a 25 minute drive into Willemsted many times in order to get my email.

I spoke to the beleaguered manager for about 45 minutes who explained that because Habitat is sort of a timeshare/condo set up, no one seems to want to pay for general maintenance. I was actually way too understanding of "his" problems which I didn't pay to obtain.

I realize that my main purpose in going there was to dive but that doesn't mean I want to stay in a remote dump where nothing is as advertised.

I bought the trip thru Travelocity and it was pre-paid but I still left 1 night earlier just to get out of the damn place. I am currently at the Holiday Beach hotel which is very nice and am using the dive shop at the Marriott which is just a few minutes away by car. You can use the dive shop at Holiday Beach but it is very average. No night dives etc.

In any event I would urge anyone considering Habitat Curacao to look elsewhere. The place is a mess.


Sy

 

[diversteve]

Need to descend 3 floors of stairs several of which are broken. Saw a few people catch their sandals on the stairs and would have had a horrific fall had they not caught themselves.

I wasn't so lucky, dropped a weight and as I lunged to get it (stupid I know, should've just let it fall) I scraped about a 1x2" patch of skin off the back of my shin. The next entry sure was fun...

Surprisingly I thought Habitat was in better shape than Sunset Waters...the places to stay seem to be Kura Hulanda or the Marriott. But I'm sure they're both a lot more $$.

 

[fisheyeview]

We were just at Habitat in August. Although it is not the Hilton, we had no problem with the place. Our room was clean and functional. I remember there being a TV in the room, but we never turned it on so I can't comment on the reception.

While we were there they were renovating the rooms in the 700 building. We strayed in the 600 building. They were also starting to build a new locker area at the end of our trip.

We never ventured into the game room or the gym. We were there to dive. If the website is out of date then they should update it so that it is accurate.

As photographers we travel with a laptop. Everything we read about the Internet connection said you had to go to the lobby for the wireless connection. We paid for wireless connection for the time we were there. We were expecting to have to go to the lobby. I was downloading some pictures from our first day when I discovered that I could get the wireless connection from our room. It was nice to sit out on the balcony, drinking beer, and posting on SB.

We booked through their booking agents Maduro Dive. We asked them a lot of questions before we booked to make sure it was the place we wanted to stay. It is definately a dive resort. If you are looking for more luxury then one of the other hotels is probably for you. We loved it though, and will be going back.

I live in South Florida and am in commercial property management. I know what it takes to get work done, and I expect it done fast. The islands are different. Maybe I do not feel frustrated with the slow process of work in the islands because I grew up gowing to some remote places in the Bahamas. At times it would seem as work was actually going backwards.

Everyones expectations from a dive trip are different. There are those that go on a vacation and want to do some diving while they are there. Then there are those that go to dive 24 hours a day, and will rest when they get home. We fall into the last catagory.

What ever your goals for a vacation are you need to plan your trip accordingly. I am not saying that your bad experience at Habitat is your own fault. If the website is out of date then it needs to be fixed so that people are not misinformed. We got all of the information from the website, and then asked a lot of questions of the booking agent to make sure it was what we were looking for. We do not look for the Hilton, but we don't want a Roach Motel either.

 

[ronscuba]

A dedicated dive resort versus a resort that has diving. That little play on words can mean a big difference. Habitat is definitely a dive resort. Their house reef and 24/7 convenience of lockers, rinse tubs, showers, bathrooms, is one of the best setups out there.

A clean room, good air conditioning, plenty of hot water and I had no problems with TV reception. Add in the quality and convenience of the house reef, IMHO, the $140/night double occupancy room rate is a bargain.

Sorry your stay did not meet your expectations or meet what was described on their website. Your comments and complaints are all valid, but to me, the pluses of the resort far outweigh the minuses.

 

[Damselfish]

Yes, Habitat is a dive resort, but I don't see that as an excuse for letting things go to hell. We have been going there from when it had just opened in 96, until our last visit Aug 06, When it first opened, it was a simple but nice place (and the restaurant was even pretty good back then.) The last time, I would describe the public areas as pathetic and the rooms depressing. It's a shame, since the dive op is so good.

It's good to hear there are some signs of renovations happening, but I'll certainly wait to hear the place has greatly improved before I consider returning there. Kura Hulanda is so much nicer with an even better house reef (although further from town and I much prefer Habitat's dive op.)

Obviously someone doesn't want to pay to fix the place, but I don't know what the excuse is about timeshare/condos. It's a big gated community and I don't know what the structure is, but I don't think there's any timeshares or condos in the whole place. There's lots of private homes. The smaller cottages up on the hill used to be in some sort of a ownership/rental pool arrangement with the hotel (we toyed with buying one at the time but I didn't think the location way up on the hill would be good for rentals through the hotel, and I sure as heck didn't want to stay up there myself!) Anyway, that hasn't been the case in a long time and AFAIK they are all private ownership unrelated to the hotel at this point. I don't think the hotel itself is any such thing (and if it was, you'd think the owners would be screaming bloody murder about the lack of maintenance and willing to invest a bit to protect their investment.)

 

[sytech]

The very nice houses up the hill from Habitat are part of a development which has some type of relationship with the resort. Owners can use the dive shop and restaurant at a discount.

Regarding Internet availability I have been to lots of hotels and even the simplest have an internet connection. I don't see why I have to carry a laptop to a hotel if I'm on vacation.

When speaking to the Manager at Habitat it was clear that he was totally in over his head and that he was aware of how bad things had gotten there. He had a pile of complaints on his desk and I read one from a travel agency in Germany saying that given the conditions at Habitat they would not be sending any more of their clients there.

I wasn't expecting a Hilton or anything near it but one expects a modicum of competency and maintenance of the premises. For anyone who is so enamored of the "Easy Divers" shop there stay at another hotel and drive to the dive shop. I paid $158 per night plus food and diving. I made a big mistake by relying on their website and apparently Travelocity doesn't know any better either.

I could have gotten a nicer room at the Hilton closer to town for about $130. Check other places.

Final words-Just because you go on a "dive" vacation doesn't mean that you forfeit decent facilities and accomodations especially for a place that isn't a bargain to begin with.

Sy

Yes, Habitat is a dive resort, but I don't see that as an excuse for letting things go to hell. We have been going there from when it had just opened in 96, until our last visit Aug 06, When it first opened, it was a simple but nice place (and the restaurant was even pretty good back then.) The last time, I would describe the public areas as pathetic and the rooms depressing. It's a shame, since the dive op is so good.

It's good to hear there are some signs of renovations happening, but I'll certainly wait to hear the place has greatly improved before I consider returning there. Kura Hulanda is so much nicer with an even better house reef (although further from town and I much prefer Habitat's dive op.)

Obviously someone doesn't want to pay to fix the place, but I don't know what the excuse is about timeshare/condos. It's a big gated community and I don't know what the structure is, but I don't think there's any timeshares or condos in the whole place. There's lots of private homes. The smaller cottages up on the hill used to be in some sort of a ownership/rental pool arrangement with the hotel (we toyed with buying one at the time but I didn't think the location way up on the hill would be good for rentals through the hotel, and I sure as heck didn't want to stay up there myself!) Anyway, that hasn't been the case in a long time and AFAIK they are all private ownership unrelated to the hotel at this point. I don't think the hotel itself is any such thing (and if it was, you'd think the owners would be screaming bloody murder about the lack of maintenance and willing to invest a bit to protect their investment.)

 

[ReefHound]

Well said, sytech. It's amazing sometimes how places will shoot themselves in the foot, angering customers over nickels and dime items. How much would it cost to provide a decent internet station or to recover the pool table? If it runs off just one vacationer they have lost.

Once you start letting little things slide it can spiral out of control. If you can't find the budget to keep things nice when your customers are happy and your occupancy rate is 90%, how are you going to find it when your customers start getting upset and your occupancy starts dropping lower and lower?

 

[Damselfish]

I don't think replacing the outdoor furniture would cost a huge amount either, but more than zero so apparently that's a problem. What's left by the pool is half broken and the really busted stuff they put down on the formerly nice beach deck, which the sea seems to be reclaiming. And it would be nice if there were again more than 1.5 umbrellas on the pool deck for shade, instead of metal stands to trip over where they used to be. The busted stair tiles are a hazard, that is a basic maintenance thing that there's no excuse not to deal with. The busted lockers are really lame and would not be that hard or expensive to fix. The lagoon is yucky, jeez if they're not going to maintain it fill it in and plant cacti. If they had just one groundskeeper who plodded away at pruning and maintenance the place would look a lot nicer, but appears to be no work on that at all.

 

[ronscuba]

The lagoon was clean my last trip this past March. You can definitely see that money is not being spent on basic maintenance, which is a shame.

I have to admit, the 24/7 convenience of the house reef and dive setup means a lot to me. A 50 yard walk from my room to the dive area, I typically dive the house reef in the morning before breakfast and again after dinner, with various shore dives around the island in the afternoon.

I did enjoy the house reef at Kura Hulanda. I'll consider staying there on my next trip, but it's not setup as convenient as Habitat. The locker room, showers and bathrooms were always locked up and only opened upon request of the attendent. I'm sure they don't have an attendent there all the time. Damselfish, how far are the rooms from the house reef ?

 

[Damselfish]

It's a bit of a longish walk from the rooms to the dive shop at Kura Hulanda, especially if your room is at the far end of the resort. The dive shop is not centrally located but is next door really, at the far opposite end from the rooms. For a diver it's probably worth requesting one of the closer rooms. On the way you have to go down a flight of rough stone stairs to the beach, across a stretch of sand, back up some stone stairs, and through the beach snack bar and across a little bridge over a gully between the properties to get there. Certainly not the end of the world but not ideal, especially if you're carting a big camera rig as my husband was.

The business with everything being locked up and you always had to ask to get in was a small nuisance. There is always someone there 8 or 9-5 (well, there was one day when they closed early afternoon on us for a "meeting" in the main shop and didn't appear to care that it would inconvienience customers since they didn't have many at the time - would have pissed me off more but my head was stuffed up that afternoon anyway. More of a nuisance is that to dive after they close (not just night dives, but even to get back from a late afternoon dive) you have to plan ahead and get a key to the locked room the hotel provides by the snack bar, and cart your tanks and gear back and forth. It's good that the hotel at least provided this solution for guests, but the setup doesn't provide the shore diving ease of a place like Habitat. They don't reliably run their boat either, which was a big problem for us as we much prefer boat diving to shore diving by car. I often say, if the Habitat dive op and facilities were transplanted to Kura Hulanda, it would be a dream dive resort. Service, rooms, food, facilities, management, everything there is good stuff. (Free high speed wireless near the lobby and 2 computers to use for free, too. )