My family just spent a little over a week at the Orlando Grande Vista. My perspective is from someone who has stayed at lower end hotels to the Ritz Carlton in Washington, the Southampton Princess in Bermuda, as well as the Marriott Canyon villas in Phoenix (three weeks ago).
Our problem was with the bath water. It wreaked!!!!!! It wasn't subtle, it just smelled really bad and this is what prompted me to write a review.
My feeling was that it was not a problem with my specific room's water but was a problem with the whole resort. I had a facility engineer inspect it and he verified my complaint and agreed with my theory saying that some resorts invest in osmosis or reverse osmosis processes to clean up their water but that this facility didn't. He also said that the water in Florida, in general, isn't very good. I later found that not to be true. We were going to move on to another hotel but we checked the Crown Plaza down the street and the water there, while slightly better, was still a problem. So we ended up staying at the Grande Vista except for the end of our stay.
I know we're not crazy. We spent a night in a Holiday Inn Express in Tampa and the water was fine and later, moved on to the Crown Plaza in Orlando by the airport and the water there was fine as well. the only other time I smelled water like this was at a hotel in Mexico.
As far as the other aspects of the stay, we stayed in a two bedroom villa. The rooms were very nice, the size of the rooms was generous, the furniture was in very good condition, the fact that there were two bedrooms was great and in general the grounds were also very well kept. It was a little older and a little smaller than the Grand Canyon Villas in Phoenix. The staff, for the most part, were very accomodating. I guess there is this corporate procedure where if you request some service, someone from another department calls you and asks if you were satisfied with the help you requested. I was very impressed with that.
The only other criticism, though much more minor was that there seemed to be a lot more leaves, etc. in the pool water than there perhaps should have been.
Though they bill this property as a 5 star property, no way is it in that class. I would say it's definitely 3.5 stars to maybe 4 stars. If you discount the bath water (hard for me to do), it was a very nice resort and we had a very nice time.
