Pullman Port Douglas Sea Temple Resort and Spa 5성

Very dated and tired rooms but lovely restaurant and their staff and fab location. The room, 248 a penthouse apartment was definitely not 5 star, the furniture was filthy, broken blinds, it smelt musty and is in desperate need of a refurb. Reported to the assistant manager and his staff but other than providing some room oil to use in the diffuser, the matter was closed on their system, really needs some TLC and maintenance staff.

As a solo traveler, i found the resort to be lovely and quiet. My room was very spacious and modern. All of the staff were lovely and always happy to help. The spacious was very relaxing and the treatment excellent. Will definitely be back soon.

Our family have had the best experience here, the staff in the morning at the restaurant were so lovely but the Pool bar gentleman ‘Javier’needs a special mention. His customer service is amazing as is his attention to detail. I also noticed he is very particular about what he does and does so with a smile. He is very warming and I noticed most people at the pool love to say hello to him and have a quick chat. A+++ for customer service. Thank you Javier, From Michelle and family

The pool is fantastic and the buffet breakfast sets you up for a great day on the reef or in the rainforest. Hotel is clean and the staff we met were very friendly and helpful. The penthouse was also perfect for a family of 4, with 2 younger kids. We’ll be back.

A copy of the letter we sent upon returning home - do not book - learn from our mistake. "Dear hotel management at the Pullman Sea Temple Resort Port Douglas, appropriate Accor Group representatives, and to whom it may concern at LuxuryEscapes.com. My name is ____ ____, a Pullman Sea Temple Resort guest (room 144) from December 27th through January 2nd, and I am writing to you today to detail the deplorable service my partner and I experienced on your premises this holiday season. This correspondence is my potentially fruitless bid to open a dialogue that both ensures that no other couples are subjected to such treatment on their once-a-year retreat, while also reaching a suitable resolution. We are deeply offended by our time in your care and cannot for the life of us understand how it is that you are not horribly ashamed. There is not one ounce of aggression or intent to provoke contained in these words, but rather an overwhelming sense of having been taken for a ride by your businesses. This trip was to be a graduation gift for my partner concluding his studies for the year and a couple’s retreat from the stressful life of young parenting; it was anything but that, and to employ the word “luxury” anywhere in your messaging is entirely incorrect and deliberately misleading. We are not wealthy people, and to spend as much as we did on this trip just to be treated like livestock has me reeling. Now, back at home, I feel as if I have let my partner down and wasted our first holiday in three years. I have attempted several different ways of encapsulating the dozens of shortfalls endured during our stay – paragraphs, day-to-day events, diary etc. Sadly, by the time we closed the car door on our hire vehicle and left, there were so many grievances that you have relegated yourself to the following: an itemised list of some of the most basic tasks required of a five-star hotel I have ever encountered in my life. • No early check-in (despite pre-arrangement via email). • Bags not held on arrival (despite other’s bags being held behind glass doors). • No valet parking - which would be fine if there were dedicated parking spaces for each room, which there are not, so every day was a scramble to find somewhere, resulting in countless laps of the ring route in the blistering heat. • The room was unclean on arrival, most notably a large hairball in the shower. • No drinking water in the room, unacceptable for anywhere five-star hotel, much less a tropical location with temperatures above 30 degrees. • No hand soap, toilet paper or tissues in-room. Forced to take one bottle of body wash back and forth from the shower multiple times a day. • In-room phone non-functional, a dead line. Instead using our mobiles to call the front desk to ask for the towels, housekeeping neglected to leave for us. • $22 watery cocktails in plastic schooner glasses from a keg, no fruit or salt. • Refused a bottle of champagne from the pool bar, citing the unwillingness to fetch an ice bucket to keep it cool for us. (we couldn’t throw money at your staff – they have seemingly turned the word “no” into a sport). • In a bid to circumnavigate this ice-bucket snafu, I walked myself to the main dining hall to request one, where I was met with half a dozen questions as ridiculous as “What was I going to do with it?” and “Where was I going to use it?”, the staff member rudely resisting this basic request at every interval, rolling their eyes and choosing to then write down my name and room number as if I were some kind of un-trustworthy criminal. • Refusal of pool-side menu items such as the salad bowls, citing “we don’t have any of that stuff”. • Empty ice cream refrigerator. Nothing at all. • Cigarette smoke from guest balconies every single day, and discarded water bottles filled with cigarette butts left on several pathways in the sun (an inspiring smell indeed). • Used band-aids in the pool. • The pool was filthy and had not been pressure washed – brown streaks and discolouration everywhere. • Unusable pool bathrooms and toilets – horrific conditions not seen in even the most disappointing caravan park. • Property Wi-Fi was so weak we were unable to even text each other. • Rooms barely ever cleaned – it’s as though housekeeping picked one thing to do each day. One day, we might get the sink cleaned, but no towels or linen or floors or bins. Four outside bins overflowed in the hot sun, so we had to hold our breath as we walked by every day – disgusting. Pool towels were used in place of white towels that had not been washed, and, eventually, just no towels at all. • Blue hotel linen bags were left on pathways for several days at a time for us to walk around, staff blindly driving past them in golf carts. • Despite paying for the hotel breakfast in advance, we were forced to prove this every single morning due to some clerical error on your end, our room never appeared on the print-out, making us look as though we were not allowed entry and holding us up and frankly embarrassing us. • No bottled water for purchase. One filtered drinking water station by the pool, forcing us to walk across the property to refill our bottles multiple times a day. • Dead frogs flattened by vehicles left on the roads for the entire 6 days of our stay – we started saying good morning to them. • In-room TV did not work – wouldn’t connect to Netflix. • Anchors for blinds pulled from gyprocks leaving black holes. • Ant colony on our ceiling. • The room door handle was broken, its floppy appearance becoming an extended metaphor for the impotence of the entire trip, we joked amongst ourselves. • Denied seating in the hotel restaurant for dinner not once but three times, stating we are only allowed room service, which indeed comes from the same kitchen, and there were up to and including 10 free tables in view. On New Year’s Eve, the hotel had the gall to slide a letter under our (broken) door, requesting our company in the dining room for a 5-course degustation. Can you imagine how that reads to guests this utterly offended by their treatment up to this point? Entirely tone-deaf and astonishingly rude. Both my partner and I have extensive work histories in the service industry, and the entire premises felt as though a gang of spoiled teenagers had been left the keys to Mum and Dad’s house while they went away on vacation. Insolence and disdain from your employees reigned supreme, and all we ever asked for were things on your menus and in your leaflets. I reiterate, we could not throw money at your staff. I am going to resist my desperate want to name individual employees and instead continue to tell myself that due to some cacophony of management errors and staffing mishaps, this potentially wonderful location has slid into chaos temporarily. Unfortunately for my partner and I, this coincided with our much anticipated holiday. Re-reading this documentation of our holiday, I am in tears. It was only our sense of humour that salvaged any part of this trip, and to know how many thousands of dollars I threw away on this experience makes me want to be sick. We have a three-year-old, are both working and studying full-time and are living back with our parents while we build our first home. This trip was meant to be 6 nights of time just for us – a luxury tropical getaway like the ones we romanticise on TV. It was anything but, and again, I cannot understand how the Pullman is not horribly ashamed. A five-star resort should present like a duck on a pond – no matter how hard they are kicking under the surface, they maintain nothing but complete composure above the waterline. We should not see nor hear any of these issues, and the staff should make things happen for their guests - a fresh towel, a bottle of water, a bar of soap, a seat in your restaurant; these were our requests. Hardly lofty expectations or the demands of the spoiled and entitled. Businesses like the Pullman Resort rot from the head down, and my partner and I are mortally offended by our experience at your establishment. There will be no recommendation or endorsement from anyone in our families at any point in time, and I am devastated." Sincerely, ____ ____