Harbor Club

I travel the Caribbean extensively for business and this is my favorite hotel. Beautifully positioned looking at the harbor with a nice short boardwalk and numerous exquisite pools with an extremely convenient high end swim up bar.

We chose this hotel for our first St Lucia experience mainly because of the good reviews. Some reviews even said things like “5 star experience” but ours was far from that. I am posting this long review so that others may weigh some concerns before choosing to book. First, the positives: The property is generally attractive. It’s modern and nautical in appearance. The pool with waterfall is nice and soothing. The location in the marina allows for a great backdrop. The rooms are spacious and comfortable. The AC worked well. The TV is a nice size with many options, all the major network channels (south Florida based) and other cable networks. The WiFi signal was strong and dependable. There are several options for food. The breakfast buffet was really good, with a variety of offerings including a station where a chef cooks omelets. They have changed their higher end restaurant now called “14 North” where we had a good meal overlooking the city. The bakery had plenty of pastries and ice cream. The pizza was delicious. They offered several a special events throughout the week, but we only took advantage of the newly offered sunset cruise. The cruise was enjoyable and for what we paid I’d say a nice value. Now for the negatives: First and foremost we had some safety concerns during our visit. We were startled and awakened to a fire alarm early one morning. By the time we got out of bed to put clothes on it stopped. There was no announcement or explanation, and so we assumed that there was no issue and it was just a false alarm. The next evening when we returned from dinner our bathroom smoke detector was making a ticking noise. Not knowing what that meant we called the front desk. 15 minutes of constant ticking and since no engineer had arrived I went down to the front desk. The receptionist called said the engineer was working on something else but he would come later. A few minutes later a maintenance person appeared but he didn’t know what to do. He wound up calling someone using our phone and that person told him just to take down the smoke detector. Despite my questioning his decision that’s what he did. We then went two nights with a missing bathroom smoke detector. These issues with fire alarm and smoke detector caused us great concern and did not give us confidence they could handle any emergency. There were a few other things to note. While the property is relatively new as some of the other reviews mentioned there are some signs of wear already. In particular the floors appeared dirty, especially the grout. This was also true of the shower tiles. They ran out of pool towels twice and we had to ask multiple people before they brought any. This was the same case for breakfast pastries- one person told us they didn’t have any more even though there was the bakery next door. When we asked another magically more pastries appeared. We also found the pool bar service to be slow as had been previously mentioned. And to be honest there weren’t even that many folks hanging out at the pool. And then the last morning of our week visit there was no hot water, apparently in the hotel, because two other couples asked us at breakfast if we had hot water because they did not. I did ask to speak with management due to the safety concerns, and both the manager and an assistant manager met with me separately. They listened to my concerns and seemed to sincerely appreciate the feedback. The manager was kind enough to take care of our transfer from the hotel to the airport which was a nice gesture. In sum: This was not the hotel experience for which we had hoped for our first visit to St Lucia. While there were some nice modern amenities to appreciate, there were just too many issues, particularly those related to maintenance, that negatively impacted our stay. And though we did enjoy the island and its majesty, we would likely not stay at the Harbor Club if we visited again.