Bill (Hedobill) - December, 2013
In the past we use to fly Air Jamaica out of Philly
to Mobay. However since being bought out they no longer have direct
flights out of there. So we used US Air this trip. Our flight was
delayed 30 minutes because of having to deice the plane but we still
made it down 15 minutes early so they now must be building in flight
times for delays. Made it thru immigration very quick and then onto
luggage pick up. They directed us to the wrong carousel, which was
broken and they were just handing the luggage thru the opening and they
were piling it on the floor. Finally got told that it wasn't our fright.
Tim Air had a guy waiting for us and the plane and pilot was waiting for
us. Time this trip was 90 min from when they opened the door of the
plane to when I was sitting at the check in counter at Hedo. Our last
trio was 5 minutes quicker but it was still a good time. We checked in
at 12:30 PM.
Walked up to the desk and Sunshine was working it.
We have known her for many years and when she saw us tried to get the OK
to upgrade us to one of the new rooms that she knew was going to be
empty the whole time we were there. The person in charge told her no. So
we ended up in room 2177. At the time there was only one other room
being used in that building and the other 8 rooms were being repainted.
Walked to the room and quickly unpacked and head down the walkway to the
nude bar. As we got close Scumba saw us and waved and by the time we
reached the bar he had our drinks on the bar with a straw in one of them
because he knew my wife used a straw. I don't know how he can remember
what we drink when he hadn't seen us for three years. We have been there
once a year since 1986 but we were not able to make it down in 2011 or
2012. We knew a lot of people from other trips and it was like coming
home.
Ended up back in the room around 6 and wife decided
to take a shower while I took a nap. When she got out she was calling my
name. Water was running out from under the shower flooding the bath room
and was running into the main room. I grabbed all the towels that were
in the room to mop up the water. Looking at the shower I could see that
the bottom track was installed back wards with the drain slots on the
out side instead of on the inside and they had decided not to remove and
fix it but instead they caulked over the openings. This resulted in the
track filling with water and running out the ends and down inside the
way and out where the wall and the floor met. Tried using the phone to
call for house keeping to bring more towels and report the problem but
the phone didn’t work. Later we found that they were replacing the phone
system and had torn out the old system for the rooms and the beach bar.
I guess they didn’t know how to do the job with out killing the old
system. As a retired phone company tech we did that a lot of times with
out killing the old system. So I had to get dress and head for the front
desk. The maintenance boss was there and I told him what happened. I
also explained how to fix the problem and he said that he would have
some one caulk where the rail and the wall met. He did arrange for more
towels to be sent to the room. The next day a guy showed up and caulked
every where's except where I told them it needed to be caulked. So when
we took our showers that night it leaked again. But since I knew it was
going to leak we put towels on the floor where the water ran out and
that stopped it from flooding the room.
Dinner was really good. The food all week was the
best it has ever been during our past visits. The night time show was
the pits. The majority of the nights it was the EC's doing dance
routines. Personally I would have preferred that the band play. One
night of dance routines is fine but not three nights of it.
Went and told the front desk about the shower still
leaking when we came up for breakfast. Lorna called the maintenance guy
on the phone and handed it to me to talk to him. I again explained where
it was leaking from and he said he would have it fixed by lunch. Come
three PM and it still wasn't fixed. Looked into the room next door that
they were painting and saw they had a caulking gun on the floor. Took
the gun and fixed the leak myself. Later that night no hot water
in the shower. We have gone before with out hot water during past trips
especially staying in the last building by the nude pool. But this
turned out to be a problem with the boiler for making hot water. None of
the guest rooms or the spa had hot water. This would end up lasting four
days and when you asked when it would be fixed they said the same thing
all four days, "the man is on his way to Kingston to pick up a part".
They lied about it, liked they have lied about problems in the past.
Again dinner was really good. They have been having
mashed potatoes at lunch and dinner not just potatoes. One night was
mashed potatoes and pumpkin which was really good. Another was mashed
potatoes with horseradish. Even the beef at the carving station was
tender and tasted good. Had beef, pork loin, lamb and ham on different
nights at the carving stations. The night they had lobster we didn’t
know they were serving it. That was out by the pool by the steps up to
the old glass bottom hot tub. So we never did get any.
Next day we were on the beach
and the smell of epoxy paint was filling the air. You could smell it by
the bar and people who were sitting back by the walkway from between the
two buildings had to move because of the smell. We really didn’t think
anything of it since we were sitting down by the massage shack. However,
when we returned to out room at 5 PM the smell was really bad. Even with
the door and the slider open it was burning my eyes and making me sick.
So off to the front desk to get another room. We ended up in the room
That Sunshine wanted to originally give us. When we were packing
our clothes we found that a mouse had gotten into one of the drawers and
had eaten thru three sealed packs of condoms and then had tried to crawl
inside one of them making it look like it had been used. I then found
three cookies in the drawer with my clothes. He had eaten thru a zip
lock bag that we had a package of cookies in and carried three of them
into the drawer to feed on later.
They
sent a guy to help us with the suit cases but he didn’t have a cart so
he took one and wife and I each took one and walked from room 2177 to
2127. He handed us the cards for the door and left. We quickly unpacked
again and showered and headed for the dinning room.
Piano bar was great for the whole trip. The new guy
was able to get a lot of people to stand on the piano and strip.
Lenworth would have had a heart attack had he been there to see it. But
it was a lot of fun. Headed back to our room at the end of the night and
found out only one of the two cards were working to open the door. So in
the morning we headed to the front desk to get that fixed.
The new rooms are really nice but have a few things
that need to be addressed when they do more of them. The button to open
the sliding door on to the deck took me half a day to locate. It is
mounted on the wall behind the drapes for the door where you can't see
it. Plus it is on the opposite side of the door from the handle for
opening it. Took us another trip to the front desk to get the combo for
the opening the door from the outside. The safe is now located at eye
level that is a lot better than the old rooms where it was a foot off
the floor. I couldn’t get use to the glass walls of the bath room.
Personally I didn’t like being able to see some ones legs sticking out
when they were sitting on the toilet from the main bedroom area. I would
have used frosted glass on the bath room walls instead of the clear
glass. All the light switches were upside down from what we have here in
the USA. Not sure if it is the code down there. There is both a
hand held shower and a rain head in the shower but no instructions on
how to switch between them. You need to push in a pin before turning on
the water to make the rain head work. The holder for the hand held
shower is about 5 foot off the floor so if you want to wash your hair
using that you need to bend over. I would have mounted the holder a
little higher.
Being able to walk from your room right onto the
beach is a real plus. We ended up putting two chairs right by the deck
and spent the rest of our beach time right there.
One after noon two of the locals came walking down
the beach singing Christmas songs. It was a nice change even though they
knew the words but didn’t always have them in the right order. Since it
was low attendance it was easy to get a chair any where on the beach or
pool area any time of the day. The new beach chairs are also nice. No
need to put a raft on them to be comfortable. They added two metal sets
of steps into the hot tub making it easier to get in and out. Especially
if you have been drinking. Water temp in the hot tub wasn't the same any
time we went in but it was never a problem of it being too cold but
there was once night where it was really hot and took awhile for me to
ease myself into it. They now have two huts on the nude beach. One
towards the end where the dive shack is and one on the point. They are
nice to sit in but I can see a problem when the groups come in trying to
get one.
They must have just added a lot of sand to the nude
beach because it hadn't had time to compact. You sunk down about four
inches into it when walking thru the shallow parts. It made for a great
show when two people from another hotel decided to use our beach and
leave their clothes on. Security didn't make them leave when a few
guests complained about them. When they finally decided to leave it was
on two ski jets. The one drunk girl tried to climb on and fell off the
other side. It was a good show to watch.
Went back to our room and once again one key card
didn’t work. So another trip back to the front desk. However, they told
us the system wasn’t working for programming the cards and were told
they would bring the cards to us on the beach later. It wasn’t a big
problem since we had the sliding door we could use to get back in. But
it was another thing that required a trip a second trip to the front
desk to get fixed.
They were replacing the tiles on the walk way next
to the gym. They were working on it for four days and still weren't done
on the day we were leaving. The workmanship was really bad where the new
tiles met the old ones. Instead of butting them up the new tiles ended
up over top of the old which resulted in a tile high bump that I know
some one is going to trip on. With that way closed they placed signs
telling you to use the walkway that took you past the two small pools
and the entrance to the disco. It was a really dark walkway so people
complained about not being able to see at night. So they placed a high
powered twin work light at the darkest spot to light it up. Only problem
is they placed it at face height so as you walked up the path you were
blinded. I told Lorna about this and she wrote it down but nothing was
done by the second night. So I mentioned it to Patrick who is in charge
of the spa. He asked me to show him so we walked down the path and he
saw right away what I was talking about. He tried to aim the lights
differently but what I told him it needed was to be lowered. However, he
didn’t know how to work the telescoping leg. So I loosened the lock and
lowered the stand so it was about two feet off the ground and no longer
got into some ones eyes. I kidded him about this being the second thing
I had fixed for the hotel since arriving. We went back to the returnees
party. The food as usual was great for it. However, none of the managers
were there and no one talked about what was going on. Even the one owner
who was staying there, the other had left the day after the hot water
problem started, didn’t attend. All they did was introduce the bar and
dinning room staff and then held the free week contest, very
disappointing. They didn't even talk about the no hot water problem.
What was also disappointing was the way the owner staying there spent
every day and night partying on the beach or in the piano bar. If I had
been him I would have been in the maintenance department managers face
24/7 asking for hourly reports about why it wasn’t fixed and I would
have been looking over the shoulder as they were working on. The other
thing that gave a bad impression to some of the guests was the fact that
the owner ate every night in Mario's and never in the main dining room.
It gave the impression that the food wasn’t good enough for them to eat
even though it was just the opposite. The food was the one thing that
really stood out the whole week as being the best ever.
Christmas was the next day and at breakfast we
asked why they were not playing Christmas music like in past years.
Every one we talked to passed off the questions saying they didn’t
handle the music in the dinning room. We finally got one of the EC's to
check and we were told that the DJ didn’t have any Christmas music. But
I guess after so many people asking after lunch by the nude pool they
started playing Christmas music.
Dec. 26th was out last day. This had been our trip
from hell as far as the room goes and any thing related to it. The
people we knew from years past and the new ones we met where the best.
The EC's were probably the worse of any of our trips. Only Winston and
Fabian made it a point to talk to us when ever they saw us. The female
EC's not once said hello even when I said hello to them first.
When we were checking out the front desk person
asked how our stay was and I said it wasn’t that great and we would not
be coming back again. She called Lorna over to address our problem. She
went back and talked to Donna Grant who told her to get our e mail
address and they would send us a voucher for one free day on our next
trip. I told her that we wouldn’t be coming back. We told her if
we return to Negril next year we will be staying at Couples Negril,
where our friends who use to go to Hedo now go.
Got to the airport only to be told that the plane
from Philly was 45 min late so there would be a delay. When they started
boarding every one they had to stop because of mechanical problem and
made the people get back off. Took them 45 min to fix so ended up with a
90 min delay but we really didn’t care. Only problem I ran into was my
Verizon smart phone could not get dial tone in the air port. We were
able to make calls on past trips but not this one. We could get data but
I couldn’t call the car service to let them know about the delay. So
they had a guy waiting an extra 90 minutes for us. He did say that he
was able to keep tract of the delay arrival on his computer. We had paid
for a town car to pick up up but it had a problem so they sent a stretch
limo to pick us up. It was a nice 90 min ride back home.
Over all once we got into the new room and out of
the room from hell things went a lot better. But still there were a lot
of little things that caused problems. A lot of people are going to say
that they don’t care about no hot water for four days or other problems
because they are there for the open sex and not the rooms. Well, I don’t
care about getting my rocks off watching a couple screw in the hot tub.
Like a lot of our friends we have gotten to the point where I don’t need
open sex shows. If I am going to pay the high cost of going to Hedo I
want hot water when I take a shower. They said they have spent over 3.5
mill on remodeling the place. But when they increased the water pressure
to the rooms the pipes were blowing out. They should have started by
fixing the water and electrical and phone problems first. Then started
on the rooms. As I said before, for me this will be my last visit. We
will either head down the street to Couples Negril or maybe go to Vegas
next Dec. It has been a great time visiting Hedo but I have changed and
Hedo has changed. I now what more that what they can provide. If you
want to show off or watch couples having open sex and don’t care about
hot water and such then by all means continue to go. Your tastes are
different than what mine are now and you will continue to enjoy
yourselves.