Sandies Tropical Village

The spa! The friendliness of the restaurant staff (apart from the chef). The pools. The A/C.

Overall this was quite a miserable experience. We arrived excited only for the guard to shout rudely at our external taxi driver as he didn't know where to park. On check-in, we were given quite a very room smelling disgustingly of urine and after some rude dismissals by the reception staff, I spoke with booking.com customer service, which managed to convince the managerial staff and we were given a better room. Thank you booking.com customer service, we were actually very ready to leave at the time. They said the room was foul-smelling because of a wedding party. (??) I had read lovely reviews of the chef on trip advisor, a large number of reviews saying he can make lovely food requested even with short notice so I thought not to bother him early in advance. When we arrived, we informed him we were vegan and very open to whatever he could make. He said there's a pasta station in every meal so we mostly had that for dinner every day. On only one afternoon he specifically came to ask us what we would like to eat and that was apparently only because there was another family he had been tending to that needed the same requirements for that mealtime. The next day he said 'oh thank god you aren't having lunch with us' and breathed a huge sigh of relief, after which he never asked us our plans nor our ideas for meals. Which we found rude considering he was doing so for all the other families. I really do not want to pull the racism card here but there is something really fishy going on with him. He was so so rude to us till the point where my mother didn't even want to come down for dinner (for what? just pasta for the umpteenth time? to look at the rude chef?) Chef Ayaz, please treat all your guests the same. Many towels have stains.