RIVIERA RESORT AND SPA

I stayed here for Easter weekend. 3 nights, arrived Thursday and checked out sunday. The whole reason we booked at Margaritaville was because it was labeled as a "resort". Well, there's nothing "resort" about it. First and foremost, check in is at 4pm, which I think is a little ridiculous and unfair to the guests, but anyway we arrive Thursday around 7pm and pay for the valet service. We get to our room, room 7109, it's a nice room, small but nice, 1 queen bed and a pull out sofa bed. Bathroom has a tub and two sinks and a stand up shower and toilet in a separate private room within the bathroom. One of the sinks smelled the whole 3 nights, just a foul odor so we ended up using just one sink. This room in particular came with a patio overlooking the parking lot.

We decide to go out and explore downtown which is a good 5-10 minute drive south from our "resort". We wait outside by the valet booth for a good 15 minutes and no ones around. We go to the front desk and the lady there says she can help us out and gets my parking permit and retrieves my keys. She hands me the keys and says to me she can show me where my vehicle is parked so I can fetch it myself. I was in disbelief and reminded her I paid for the valet, but apparently, they were short staffed that night, so they had no valet at the moment.
I go retrieve my vehicle and go on with our night. They said they would cancel the valet service and take it off the bill by the way.

The following morning we go to have breakfast at the restaurant that is located inside the "resort" in which then they deny us and tell us that they cant accommodate us because they were short staffed once again. We end up going out to get food.
We hit the pools later and we enjoy a few hours of pool time. I go look for towels and there seems to be no towels anywhere, so I had to go out of my way to fetch towels, keeping in mind that the pools are not very close to one another.
Next morning we have a nice day planned and decide to take showers but there hasn't been anybody come by to do house cleaning so I call for fresh bath towels to no avail. 3 hours later I call again and still no help. I go and find a cleaning lady to get towels from myself.
Before leaving for the day, I go to the front desk and ask for house cleaning services, this time in person. They abide and tell me they will do it.
We come back some hours later (we went to the airplane museum which I highly recommend) and to my surprise the room is left the same! I call to ask why they haven't came by to do room cleaning service and they tell me, you guessed it: "we're short staffed".

Long story short, I don't recommend this place. You pay extra money for higher standards which are NOT met. We had a very unpleasant time, it was 2 adults and 2 children. We had fun because we made the best of it but they seem to lack a caring attitude towards their guests. Staff doesn't smile, doesn't greet you, doesn't help you, doesn't cater to you as a resort should.
Or maybe I have the wrong idea about what a resort is?
Aside from all that, they charge a resort fee, and that resort fee has taxes and fees! Yes! you read that correctly, fees on top of fees.
Also, if u smoke in the parking lot or smoke while taking a walk to 7-11, which is across the street, they will charge you a 500$ dollar fee.
They say it's for "deep cleaning" but there is nothing to "deep clean" if you smoke outside the room.

Guests be weary. You can get better bang for your buck elsewhere. There was nothing impressive about this "resort". They are not capable of accommodating their guests or providing for them. As a resort, you're held to higher standards and those standards better be met, especially if you're charging fees on top of fees and fraudulent "smoking fees". 2 thumbs down.

Overall: it's located ~10 minutes away from downtown. The self parking is horrible. The valet parking is no better. The service is bad. The pricing is terrible. The rooms are small. But the pools are nice and warm.

Soletoanosolepresenteo

Pet friendly.

Paid for a Deluxe room.... Nothing about it was Deluxe except the price.

Staff was Really nice. Check in was easy. The room was nice. The shower was Horrible. The tub was pealing. Something I didn't even know could happen. No shower pressure and water didn't drain. There was a light out over the toilet and on the mirror. Wish we had a heavier blanket because the nights were cold. Oh.. no vent in the bathroom either. So the toilet seat was cold at night.

This property has So much potential but the rooms need work. It's nice... but not $600 a night nice. If we were going to be their longer than a weekend, I would have changed hotels.

I never write reviews like this, but I feel like people should be warned before booking a stay here.

I was really disappointed in our stay. While the pools were nice, there were never clean towels available. They only had one area to pick up towels, and it emptied in the matter of seconds once clean towels were brought out, and there were never enough to go around. We spent two full days by the pool, and we saw the towels be stocked maybe twice. We spent hours waiting for towels. The bar at the pool was nice, the bartenders/wait staff were the most pleasant and helpful staff we encountered, and the food/drinks were good…however upon getting home from our stay we noticed we had 7 charges from the pool bar, when we only had two tabs for the entire stay that came out to about $250. The additional charges amounted to almost $1000 and two days later, we are still unable to get help in clearing up the erroneous charges from the hotel. I was also charged a large bill after checking out that no one can explain after I had already paid in full at the time of booking, and it is more than triple the cost of the resort fee that I was prepared to pay at the time of checkout. I will now have to dispute the charges with our bank, which is a nightmare. It is unacceptable that the hotel refuses to take accountability for the charges or assist us in clearing them up, they can’t even explain what they are for.

We also paid extra for a suite believing it would give us more room and also expected for the price, a nice view. Instead we were still left cramped, the bed kept sinking into the bedframe as there were no box springs, the doors to the bathroom were broken, and we were incredibly disappointed to find our balcony was not only filthy to the point that we didn’t even go out on it but our view was also of a stucco wall from the building next to us. The bathrooms were not very clean, with rust around the drains and fixtures and cracks in the tile/shower. There was also no shower door or curtain, so water ended up getting everywhere on the floors and caused a safety hazard for our children. Not what I expected or paid for at all.

Lastly, we had dinner the first night in the hotel at the grill restaurant, and it was horrible. We waited over an hour to get our food despite the restaurant being empty, were never offered refills or even visited again by the waitress after our initial order was taken, and half of our dishes came out cold. The food itself was horrible, my son’s hamburger could have been a hockey puck, and we left hungry and annoyed at how much we just paid for such an awful meal. We never did find our waitress to complain to…we had to ask another employee for our check to finally be able to leave.

All in all, I will not be returning to this “resort” as the cost of staying does not justify what you actually receive, in addition to all of the false charges we are not stuck trying to clear up ourselves as the hotel will not help or even explain the charges. Ridiculous.