Ok, 2 months after our Disney World trip, I am venturing out here to the boards just to peek in. I'll tell you about our Sheraton Vistana Villages stay. We did a split stay. 3 nights offsite (SVV) to visit relatives and go to Legoland, and then 7 nights on property (CR).
The SVV stay was AWFUL. We stayed free with Starwood points.
Got our room by the St.Augustine pool. Yay. The good ended there.
The pool was fine. Cool pirate structure. First day there? My Star Wars Weekend shirt, prescription glasses and room key get stolen from the pool. I'm pretty sure this was just a random teen that saw a star wars shirt and grabbed it, then threw away the glasses - but $300 glasses down the drain!
Security was a miserable fail. Wait for the lifeguard to call some guy w a walkie-talkie over. He can't do squat. He calls some other ppl. Wait an hour. Get given a number to call for security. Call them they can't do anything. Complain to the front desk, ask for a manager, get redirected to this offsite security company again. It was really really horrible runaround.
Thru it all they kept asserting random things like "Are you sure you didn't just lose them?" ... as if they were trying to deflect liability or something.
File a report? Comp a night? Here have dinner on us to make up for your glasses? NOTHING. Just runaround.
They would not rekey the room. So some random person HAD our key, and could walk around trying door by door and eventually get in (or just watch where we go!), yet their line was "it doesn't have your room number on it so it's fine". HORRIBLE.
At least two of our nights are ruined trying to get ahold of someone. They don't even have pseudo-police reports to fill out. They did not send out a notice to guests about watching their stuff, so they didn't care if it happened to anyone else.
After we checked out we realized we left our backup credit cards in the safe... so now at a Disney hotel, we call over to them. Try to get ahold of someone who can do something was a nightmare. Finally got ahold of someone at security who said she'd go to the safe and see. Got her name. She actually called us back and secured our stuff, said it would be at the safe at the front desk to pick up. Great.
We go to the front desk ~on a Disney world night, costing us valuable Disney time~ and get the runaround again! The best part -- picture the lobby there are two sides. I walked in to one side... and talked to the guy. He called security, had me wait a bit. Nobody showed up. So when I protested, he said he'd have to call over to customer service. So he did -- and the phone rang -- on the other side of the room! He could have just pointed me to that desk an hour ago! So I walk over there and demand to talk to someone.
Again nothing happens. They call security, and check several safes, I'm not sure where they were checking. Then they could not access certain safes. Totally pissed off and now having wasted a few hours of a Disney night and an evening water pageant I storm out and shout that their security is a miserable worthless department that couldn't secure anything. Sadly there were no guests to hear me.
Got back to the CR, talked to my wife who got all pissed off... called over there again, complained, and drove back again... gave them another earful... and finally got our stuff.
We also did the "no-pressure" timeshare thing for $100, figured we had to get back some of our losses. It was not a great deal and pretty typical high-pressure waste of time except that you get $100 and some free snacks for your kids. I'm sure our kids ate more than their share of packaged treats and juices. We sure got them!
It was just a miserable hotel stay. I would never stay at this hotel again, and certainly would not buy into a timeshare at a place where the security is so bad and the chain of authority nonexistent. We even told the timeshare sales rep about the security debacle and how we wouldn't stay here and she was speechless. How can you really try to keep selling it after that?
I didn't expect them to make up for my loss... but I did expect them to care.
After it all, I took it up w Starwood, which I've used for 20 years. They comped me a night of points back. I got called back from a mgr, and he asserted over and over that was totally not an acceptable way to handle their guests. I felt he was genuine.
Not looking for sympathy or anything like that, just sharing so others know since reviews speak. It's really unfortunate. We stayed at the SLBV (Lake Buena Vista) before and had much better results for an offsite hotel just across from Disney. Once we moved to the CR it was night and day. There is just no way to compare the worst hotel stay of your life to one of the most magical.
Disney Deluxes are expensive -- but you get what you pay for!