I just returned from my 5th trip to Bonaire and my third stay at the Yachtclub apartments. I will not be staying there again. On each of my visits, they have not had our studio apartment ready and have put us up in alternative accomodations. They put us in Aqua Viva (yuck) last May and in the Eden Beach motel this last trip. It is a huge inconvenience to have to unpack and repack and move.. basically it slows your "arrival" by a full day. What is really annoying is that they offered no compensation at all AND that in all 3 cases we had made the reservations MANY months in advance.

You may ask why we returned 2 more times, well we liked the pricing and we assumed that it was a "fluke"..but shame on us.. 3 times in a row!

DONT STAY AT YACHTCLUB APARTMENTS!!!!!

word to the wise!

We do not usually react to these reports, , but in this case we have to make an exception. We are sorry for the inconvenience of Mr. Christopher "Papa Nut" Hodges, which we told him, and by the way, he liked the studio there, and made us believe he understood.
The time in May 2002 when Mr. Hodges came with 2 friends, they knew in advance that we would not have a studio for his friend until the second night they were here. One of his friends requested us to make a reservation for him elsewhere for the first night which we did. So it is very unfair to say it is the third time it happened (as he claims on each of his visits)
Furthermore we regret that Mr Hodges (Papa Nut) chose to put all this on the newsgroup, instead of talking to management directly.
Mr. Hodges was always very positive and full of compliments about Yachtclub Apartments. Thank God his friends still are.

There are always 2 sides to every story.

As a follow up..

The management of the Yachtclub contacted me regarding the matters above. I appreciate them taking the effort to discuss my concerns with them.

Apparently I was not 100% correct above, on one of our trips they told us in advance that we would need to have accommodations for the first night. i apologize about the error.

Also, we should have expressed our dissatisfaction at the time of the event so they could have taken other steps to accomodate us.

What I left out in the above posting was that the Apartments do represent a good value and are always clean and the staff always friendly..

In our rush to "get into vacation mode" we should have told them we were not happy with the off site accomodations the first night and perhaps we could have reconciled it there.. it is certainly not the first case where a customer kept their mouth shut but let their frustration fester.

Thanks to the management of the Yachtclub for being concerned enough to resolve our dilemma

Thank you, Cap'n, for coming back with the good words. Many people don't stand so tall.

I agree wholeheartedly, Glen.

Nice to see you all kiss and make up. :-)

Jake

PS I know the folks behind Yacht Club and Total Car and find them to be pretty reasonable and nice (and I have no business relationship with them either).

Captain,
Will you clarify how they rectified the situation?

We had an off line chat and they listened to me vent some steam. I should have spoken up (a little louder) when we were there but I did not.

Overall I have had a very good experience there and part of my frustration was with the rental car.

Sometimes it only takes one more straw to break the camel's back.

They are good folks and they work hard and they are very busy so like any other owner/operator type deal, I think they are juggling lots of things and we needed to be a bit more clear as to our dissatisfaction.

I dont think that will be a problem in the future!

Did they offer you anything as compensation?

Captain,
Are you going to let us know if you received anything in exchange for your change of opinion? Call me distrustful, but I find that most of the time when there is a drastic change of opinion, it usually has more to do with than a simple conversation. And the fact that you haven't responded to this thread . . .

Darryl

Captain, I should also like to know the answer to the above question. Also, would you stay there again? margarite