My wife Jean and I had a great stay at Sandals Antigua March 29th-April 4th. We have been to Sandals Grand St. Lucia and Sandals Grand Bahamian, plus my wife has stayed at a Beaches in Jamaica.
Our experience with Sandals has been consistently positive and successful. When we have encountered problems, we have found the Sandals staff to be responsive and considerate.
We booked butler level service for this trip, as it was a special honeymoon vacation to celebrate our recent wedding. Having a butler was fun. Our two butlers were Wendell and Larry. Most of our interaction was with Wendell. Both he and Larry were very professional and very good humored young men who did an excellent job. Their work made this one of the nicest vacations we have had.
We stayed in beachfront Rondoval 301. It was a great room and the location was beautiful. Dickinson Bay is a lovely beach. It's busy, but in an interesting, nice way. The beaches in Antigua are all public beaches, so vendors will approach you. But they were without exception polite, accepting a gracious no thanks with equal politeness. Jean did end up purchasing a cute little handcarved cat.
We hired a cab to visit Hawksbill Beach and Long Bay Beach. Our driver Bill was very nice. He went out of his way to show us various interesting sights. The world cricket championships were going on and he drove by those for us to see the new stadium and all of the goings-on. He also showed us where the rich and famous were building beautiful new homes.
Antigua is beautiful and our drives around the countryside were one of the highlights of our vacation. The beaches are simply stunning...postcard stuff. When we return we will make it a point to visit as many of them as possible.
The meals at Sandals were uniformly good, the food fresh and well prepared. The scenery surrounding the meals was the highlight of each day. There was no bad seat in any of the restaurants. Jean found that if she asked to be seated as closely as possible to the beach (and didn't care about smoking or non-smoking) the host or hostess would make a very respectable effort to seat us where we wished. I have never enjoyed so many meals in such a perfect setting!
The entertainment or group activities usually don't interest us at all when we are on vacation. Jean and I are husband and wife but we are fortunate enough to also be best friends. Our time alone together on a nice vacation is what makes the vacation really fun. One of the things we like most about Sandals is that it is couples only. You can enjoy a fairly private, quiet stay. But we did attend one night's entertainment and it was surprisingly good. There was a musician named Keith Pole - nice job, very heartfel performance. There was also an amazing limbo / fire act that I wouldn't have believed if I wasn't sitting ten feet from the man performing the act.
There is a huge new Sandals resort going up next door. It looks like it will be beautiful. We had read some controversial opinions online about this new resort. I asked our taxi driver Bill how he thought local folks felt about it. His answer, which I think made sense, was that most Antiguans thought the idea of building such big new resorts was a good thing for their economy. To be honest, I'm hoping we will return and stay there when it is finally completed.
We had a great time and would recommend Sandals Grande Antigua wholeheartedly. Book the butler service and have a good time.