Facilities decent, customer service lacking
The facilities were decent, but the staff lied to us repeatedly, making for a very undesirable experience. When we reserved our room at Westgate Lakes, I specifically asked about the recreational amenities and was never told that you have to attend their sales pitch to become a V.I.P. Member to use their amenities. Upon our arrival on Sat. evening, we were thrown into a whirlwind where we were told that to use the facilities on site we had to attend their “90 min presentation about the property” and were also informed that this was the only way to get discount tickets to the amusement parks. We told them which parks we wanted to attend, specifically mentioning SeaWorld. We scheduled our presentation time first thing in the AM so that we would have time to attend church that morning. Long story short, the “90 presentation” was a 2 ½ hr. sales pitch. We were upfront with their sales rep. that we were not interested in buying as we are already owners with another company and had traded for our stay at Westgate. Incidently, we have been owners for five years and have never been required to attend a sales presentation to use facilities at any other resorts in which we have stayed. I should also mention that we had our four young children with us and chose not to put them in the children's room because we wanted to keep it short so that we could attend our worship service. Suffice it to say, we missed our church service, the children were very tired of sitting through the talking, and in the end, after we had sat through it all to get discount tickets were informed that they don't provide tickets for the SeaWorld Parks even though their location is only 1 mile from SeaWorld. Keep in mind, that by this time, we had told at least three of the staff members that this was the whole reason why we agreed to sit through this meeting.
We were also told that we could go out to the island in the lake and watch Disney's fireworks, so trying to make it up to the kids for having to sit through the meeting, we went out there that evening only to find that the bridge to the island was broken down and completely unusable. We tried to watch the fireworks from nearby, only to find that all you could see were the bright flashes of light, not the actual fireworks themselves.
Our room was nice, but some of the appliances like the toaster and DVD player did not work and when we tried to call the front desk (which by the way is called the V.I.P. Desk, implying that you can only use it when you have sat through their sales pitch to get their V.I.P. Card), we found that our phone did not work either. So, we walked to the front desk to let them know of the things that weren't working and asked if we could have our children go to the childrens room so we could talk with a manager and were told that the childrens room was only available if you are listening to their sales pitch eventhough it's listed on their paper about their amenities. We asked to talk to a manager and waited in the lobby for over 30 min. until they finally told us that the managers were all busy right now and would call us later, then handed us a box of cookies. Really, like that was supposed to make it all better? And, how were they going to call us when the phones weren't working, which was one of the problems. Needless to say, we never got a call or a visit from the management, the phones never got fixed, we couldn't watch movies on the DVD player, we never had a working toaster, we didn't get discount tickets to SeaWorld, we missed our worship service and wasted 2 ½ hrs. of our vacation being lied to.
I could go on about improvements that could be made to their customer service, like providing maps and directions of the surrounding area and explaining how the shuttle system works, etc. We made the best of our vacation considering the circumstances, but we will never stay at this resort or any of the others owned by this company again.