Serenity Coast Resort

There are several things I liked about the hotel. The room was very big and comfy with all the necessary facilities - 2 bedrooms, a living room with a kitchen and a balcony. Also super nice attached bath in the bedroom with a nice view of the sea and beach. But the location of the hotel is not perfectly well, there are almost no places to hang out around, no bars, no restaurants nearby. Some places around the hotel look abandoned, for example around the swimming pool and the way to the beach. But on the other hand, it is a very quiet place.

Stayed here with family and friends and its great value! The Xiaodonghai bay is a great area and has a few hotels with good breakfasts around such as Anatara. They have a free bus that goes from the apartments to intercontinental, anatara and they summer mall in Dadonghai area that have a few drop off and pick up times (really convenient). Great option when you have 2 couples or family that needs rooms as they start at 2 bedroom apartments. There are great penthouse rooms available too with 3 bedrooms if you want to spend a little extra. If you get in off season the prices are very good. Pool is across the road but have the right stuff for a good holiday.

Just to note that the 2 stars earned here are entirely for the room. We had a 2 bedroom suite and as a whole it was fine. Stuff broke several times but the repair people fixed them quite quickly. It doesn’t look quite like the photos but overall the room is fine. The issues and problems come with the rest of the hotel which I can say is both pretty disgusting and also quite dangerous. I’ll start with the general feel of the hotel, it is kinda run down, tired and in desperate need of renovation. Please don’t believe the photos on here and on the website, the photographer deserves some sort of award for making it look the way they did. The pool area posed one of the biggest issues here. It is a walk from the hotel, inside what they term the “aquatic paradise”, I think dystopia would have been a better description for it. You walk through a rusting area of forgotten and dirty spa areas to get to the pools. The adult pool is at the top and quite small. On our first visit we asked the lifeguard/attendant for towels (in Chinese) but he looked up, then just ignored us and carried on playing a game on his phone. We had the same response from him when we asked about the little paddle boats as well. We got our own towels from where the laundry had been dumped in the old games area (it’s now just a junk storage shelter). The worst initial experience was from the toilets and showers at the pool. The stink coming out of them was horrific. Going inside you can see why. The 2 cubicles have doors slightly ajar but have been metal wired shut, what is inside is truly awful. They have both been left with excrement everywhere and flies crawling all over them. As a side note I checked 4 days later and it was still just the same so it could have been like this for weeks. Does the hotel not realise that leaving rotting human waste in a hot, open environment and next to a swimming pool is a serious hazard to health?!? The shower were really dirty as well with old underwear on the floor. The children’s pool seems kind of abandoned with festering, dirty looking water standing in the sand area. There is no lifeguard on duty at the children’s pool at all and I can’t really say there is one at the adult pool either as they are only at the booth 50% of the time and always just staring into their phones. As guests leave and leave their rubbish and towels behind they are left for many hours as no staff can be bothered to tidy up, therefore ants everywhere. The 20ft drop from the adult to children’s pool also seems unsafe when the paddle boats could easily go straight over. If you use the pool with kids keep a close eye on them at all times. People are smoking everywhere in the hotel, including in the elevator. 4 times my 5 and 7 year old daughters had to squash up next to someone smoking in their faces while riding the lift. There is a sign that says no smoking but it is ignored. Hotel staff where in the lift while people were smoking twice that we saw and they didn’t say anything to them. When I complained about this to the front desk they smiled and laughed. We felt pleased we didn’t indulge in the buffet restaurant, but we did walk passed it every day. With the general cleaning and hygiene levels around the hotel it seems best. My take on it from walking through is that it reminds me of visiting Bulgaria in the 1980s. There was food there, perhaps that’s the nicest things I could say. The beach nearby is dirty with a fair amount of rubbish, dirty scum in the water and cigarette butts everywhere. Not the hotels fault, but just be aware. The hotel also has no loungers or umbrellas an they all belong to other resorts, so you’ll need to take towels and sit under a tree. There were many other little problems with the hotel but these are just a few. We complained to the front desk and decided we would leave the hotel early and move to somewhere better. They initially said that no one speaks English but eventually the manager came out and she spoke English fine. She basically told me that we could not check out early and that Chinese hotels are different. They seemed unconcerned about health and safety or hygiene and seemed to find some of it funny. We have been coming to Sanya a couple of times a year for 10 years now, we have not encountered a hotel like this before. After a lot of arguing and calls to trip.com they finally decided to let us check out early on Friday and refund the unused nights. I can not recommend this hotel to anyone unless you just want a room to sleep in and then leave the next day. We saw terrible things in just a handful of areas of the hotel, I can’t imagine how bad it is in areas that guests can’t see. Take extreme care at the pool area if you do stay here, it is a health and safety hazard. You should chose the nearby Anatara, Intercontinental, Wingate or Marriott Dadonghai. They are only a few dollars more and much, much better (plus have the backup of an international chain if you have any issues). How this hotel has such a high review score on trip.com is confusing. Perhaps they are writing them themselves, I can’t think of another explanation.