After cancelling our Dubai trip I did a sneaky thing and decided to take a look at the Sandals website to see what was available.
Straight back to Grenada because it’s a really nice resort which is perfect for us and does feel like home. I had a look on the site and couldn’t see any availability for the swim-up room, but there was for another room with a pool. I had another question about the loyalty points and also our free anniversary night so I emailed them and asked about the room I’d seen online as they didn’t have our preferred room type.
Apart from the ‘glitch’ around the second Antigua trip in 2021 (maybe I caught someone on a bad day) the customer service from Sandals has (and still is) excellent. I quickly received an email which had 2 interesting things.
- They did have our preferred room type but as it was the last 1 available for our dates it wasn’t showing on the site and had to be booked via their backend system. Needless to say I was on the phone within minutes making the booking!
- We had an amount of loyalty points which we could use for the booking, I also found out that we were entitled to a free night providing our stay was within 1 month of our anniversary – As we book our summer holiday based on our anniversary it’s always going to be within 1 week let alone 1 month, shame we didn’t find out about this until our 3rd visit where we could have used it! At the time would also couldn’t combine offers so either loyalty points or free night, we opted to use our loyalty points as we knew we weren’t going to be visiting Sandals in 2025 and we’re sure about 2026 or 2027 so didn’t to lose them.
The holiday was booked and confirmed! A week or so later we had the amended booking with the reduction in cost because of the loyalty points.
A few months later…….
Because this was quite last minute (well last minute for us) it was only about 3 months before we were due to go, of course I’d booked the parking and booked in The Bloc hotel once again.
Travel day was upon us, we’d packed 95% of our stuff the night before (only toiletries and hand baggage needed) so we were set………then I logged onto the system in the morning as I was working, only to be met with news headlines.
Some numpty at Cloudflare had released buggy updates to their systems which then installed on major infrastructure around the world causing numerous outages! This included Gatwick airport! As you could imagine I was on pins, what would happen with the holiday????
Online check-in time came and to my surprise BA’s system was functioning, it was a little slow but we checked in without any issues. All the time I was keeping an eye on the news, Gatwick’s website and other useful sites.
The time came, we finished packing, loaded the car and made our way down to Gatwick still not knowing what the aftermath of this system update would be.
Parked in the long stay carpark, jumped onto the bus and straight to bag drop – the airport was still busy, people sat around awaiting, a constant stream of announcements over the tannoy and some very tired looking members of staff. Over to bag drop, which wasn’t busy and a friendly, but exhausted member of staff checked our flight docs and passports. I asked how it had been during the day, they told me they had been solid for 11 hours without a break and luckily they were just about to go on one.
Bag drop done, to the Bloc……we checked in and went to our room, normally we’d go wandering and grab a drink and some snacks but because of everything going on the airport was really busy for the time of night. Wondering if it would be busy in the airport earlier in the day I decided it might be an option to prepare some food and take it with us, we had a couple of pizzas in the freezer, these were cooked, cooled, cut and packed up. Yep, we had a mini picnic in our room of pizza, crisps and some sweets. It was nice.
Next morning we get up, get ready and head downstairs to check out. Now one of the good things about The Bloc is depending on your room you get access to premium security for free. Not only that, but it’s a mere 10 metre walk from the reception desk to the entrance to premium security!
Through security and off to the lounge, I’d pre-booked so we went straight in – however it took a couple of laps before we found a table! I mean, if I pre-booked a time and we arrived at that time, surely it means there should be a table available?
Not to matter, we found a table, grabbed some drinks and I did the usual online check-in via the Sandals app.
Off to the gate ready for boarding. This was probably the furthest gate from where we were in the lounge! We stood around for quite a while, there were a number of tannoy announcements for passengers for our flight to go to the gate. Then we overheard a couple of staff members saying they were trying to locate a couple of passengers who had checked in but were no-where to be found.
We did eventually board the aircraft just before the departure time, this meant we were going to be late taking off…..and sure enough we were indeed late taking off, about 40 minutes or so.
I believe the pilot may have been a little throttle heavy on the outbound flight, we managed to get to St Lucia (for note the flight to Grenada stops at St Lucia first) about 10 minutes later than planned – yep, we’d made up 30 minutes!!
It’s normally a pretty quick turnaround in St Lucia, passengers get off, cleaning crew comes on, things unloaded, things loaded etc etc. Then an announcement, they had closed the runway at Grenada for a reason! Oh great!
So we waited and yes you guessed it, whilst we made up those 30 minutes we actually lost them because of the closure and arrived in Grenada about 30 minutes or so after we were due. Then it was the ever depressing wait in the slowest moving line ever, again people weren’t completing their forms on the plane! In fairness however, whilst stood in the line we were told to ensure we had written our contact number on the form. Now I’m pretty good at filling out forms, and I did not see a contact number on said form…..and I was right, we were asked to write our contact number in the box labelled ‘Countries visited’ – how silly of me for not realising this!
Passports stamped and then over to the bags and as we got to the baggage area the bags started coming through – they had been waiting as long as we had! Bags collected and outside to the Sandals desk. It was only a very short wait and we were on a mini-bus with 4 other people, listening to them talk they were expecting a long transfer time, we knew differently……
Cold towels and escorted in a different direction to the others on the mini-bus, straight to the club sandals lounge to complete check-in and be introduced to our butler. Again this didn’t take long and our butler was there, he’d said he was worried we weren’t going to arrive – honestly though, they knew our flight number so could easily track it and how delayed it was so not sure what the concern was about.
First night – yes, we had a meal in our room, we were shattered by this point and wanted to go to bed.
However, the bed was nicely made up to welcome us home and it felt like we had returned home. (Porgwin jumped in for a photo)
As we had done on our previous Grenada and Antigua trips, breakfast was a must each morning on the terrace. A lot more flies but the hurricane the island had endured just 3 weeks earlier was the cause and on the resort this apart from noticing a missing tree here and there it was the only sign that such a powerful force of nature had hit so recently.
Our first port of call on our first full day was to the Island Tours office, we wanted to see what was available so popped in to have a look. It didn’t take long until we were booked on a 4×4 Jeep Tour visiting the a chocolate museum in St Georges before heading further into the island to a Monkey Reserve, Etang Volcano crater (which is still alive but merely having an extended sleep) and Annandale falls before finally stopping off for lunch. A chance to give the 360 camera an outing!
To the beach! Back to the lovely and calm beach with its little cove – a chance for me to people watch and listen to music all the time forgetting everything else in the world. Relaxing (well for me at least!).
We spent most days having the same sort of routine, breakfast on the terrace, beach in the morning, lunch on the beach and then back to the room around 3pm for a surprise snack and enjoy the swim-up. I mean what’s the point in having a swim-up if you don’t use it?
The 4×4 tour. This was the only morning we didn’t have breakfast on the terrace, but that was because it was an early enough start without allowing extra time for breakfast – We’re on holiday, we don’t want to be getting up at 6am! Lucky we had a couple of snack bars for this very reason.
We went to the meeting point and one of our butlers was there, he’d taken the time to put together a drinks cooler and some towels for us to use for the day, not something we were expecting but a grateful touch for our day exploring the island. Mini-bus arrived and ourselves along with 2 other couples jumped in and a short drive later we were at the 4×4 centre. Oddly out of the 3 couples I was the only one who was self driving, the others both had drivers. I suppose it all depends on your point of view, I for one like driving and took the opportunity to drive as something not to miss. Others may prefer to sit and be driven around, each to their own.
There was a lot of sightseeing that day, we started off in St Georges with a quick visit to a chocolate museum, well it calls itself a museum but in reality it’s more a chocolate shop that has a few museum pieces and a small talk about the history of chocolate. There is also a chance to buy chocolate (well duh!) amongst other bits and bobs – we actually bought some chocolate pasta which we enjoyed several weeks later, you could taste the chocolate.
After the visit to the chocolate museum/shop we headed off deeper into the island with the first stop being the monkeys. These are ‘wild’ monkeys, but they have learnt pretty quickly that when a keeper comes along with food and people that they should appear (even though we were told they may not appear) – yes, they appeared. I understand they are monkeys and yes it was nice to see, but I wasn’t sure that placing food in someones pocket and getting the monkey to take it is really how wild monkeys act.
Next quick stop was a view and a half, from here you could see a massive chunk of the island, including the Sandals resort, far, far away……..
From here it was another short drive to the Annandale Falls – a chance to cool off, grab a drink and watch crazy people jump! We were not crazy enough to do this, but the guys there were!
After this break we headed off for lunch, taken to a nice local (and popular) place before returning to drop the Jeeps off and heading back to the resort. All in all, it was about 4 or so hours – that meant an afternoon relaxing in the swim-up pool!
So you’re probably asking yourself why this post is called ‘more sushi’ – well funny story.
There are 2 restaurants we love at Grenada (we like them all, but these 2 are something else) Butch’s Steakhouse (Yes I actually have steak here cause they will cook it how I like it and not judge me for it!) and Soy. Soy is a sushi restaurant, and something we try and visit twice because it’s that good, and yes we did visit it twice.
The first visit of this holiday was the same as previous visits, we’d order, eat, order, eat, order and eat – it meant we weren’t over ordering and could eat at our leisure. However, the second visit we were asked to order everything at once…..erm, OK.
This lead to a very comical photo where Mrs BtG appears to have ordered the ocean and I had 2 little pieces of sushi just for me…..I’ve been told to say we shared the food (we didn’t share everything!)
This was also the night we named our resident frog, Wilbur.
Wilbur each night sang to us as the frogs there do, you either love it or hate it but we love it. It’s calming, it’s peaceful and it’s great white noise to help you get to sleep. We discovered Wilbur had hidden himself in the door shut, never harmed when we opened or closed the door, but he was happy to sit there and sing all night, every night.
Again the following morning was the usual breakfast on the terrace, only we could tell we were at a fancy place, I mean it must be a fancy place when the jam even tells you so!
This next section is dedicated purely to our butlers, the best team of 3 butlers we have had. They looked after us beyond our expectations, they left us treats, they appeared out of nowhere to escort us to places, but not only did they escort us but they brought us drinks to enjoy whilst being escorted! Not that’s it’s a big resort, but these little touches and the attention to detail was amazing. It was such a relaxing holiday that we simply didn’t want to go.
If you know me in person you know I’m not really a hugger, in fact, I’d go as far to say I’d probably push people away if they tried to hug me – this is true for the most part, unless you are family, a very close friend or have done something to deserve it. Yes, I allowed one of our butlers to hug me cause she had deserved it – of course she didn’t know I’m not a hugger and didn’t know the story, but for those that do, this is an example of how relaxed I was and how much I felt she deserved a hug.
Why though? As I said, it wasn’t just the big things like bringing up breakfast each day, or bringing us a cocktail on the beach, but those and the little things. The little snacks, the chats, the genuinely wanting to get to know us and wanting us to be relaxed and happy, the messages on the bed at night, the bath being drawn, having a constant source of Mango Shortcake each night, the surprise drinks and being escorted to meals and to our spa (we won a free head massage), the cooler and towels for the 4×4 trip and all the other little things that made our holiday what it was.
Yes we did tip them at the end of the holiday, but let me add, this isn’t expected by them. We also spent the time before going to Grenada to get some thank you cards and some little trinkets for them, such as decent pens (they write everything down) with the Welsh Flag on them. We took the time to write each of them a personal thank you for what they had done and gave them a well deserved tip, they looked after us so it’s only fair that we acknowledge what they did for us.
We can’t wait to go back.
We flew from Gatwick South Terminal, parking in the long term carpark (they have a discount for 10% off if you sign up to their My Gatwick app), staying in the Bloc Hotel, relaxing in the No 1 Lounge and then staying for a week in an S1B – Italian Swim-Up Bi-Level One Bedroom Butler Suite.
Leave a Reply