Westgate Lakes Resort and Spa, Orlando

BUYER BEWARE The people will tell you one thing but lie about what it really means. I was told i was buying a week to use any time except holidays (fixed season). Now, after purchase, I'm being told I can't use it at all during the summer. Use caution. Beautiful place, but full of lies and broken promises. BUYER BEWARE

Lets start with parking, we could not find a place to park for 20 minutes. Once inside we had to check in with the other 200 people who were there just to get discounted Time Share tickets to disney world just for taking a 90 minute presentation. 1 1/2 hours later we were told we needed to go to another desk to finish check in. Got to the room and I thought I was back in the 70's. The room was large, but had a lot wrong with it. This place is dirty, the carpet on the floor had a variety of stains in every room. Bed covers had stains, and the bed was sunken in the middle. Every thing is old chipped or broken. The Jacuzzi in the master is what sold me. A roach was in it with several different hairs. This place is not for the Romantic or Family oriented. The guest were primarily young and rude, as they did not care what came out their mouth, even with young kids around. No one stopped them so why not. Pools are over crowded and the traffic going past your room all night, not to mention the car alarms going off in the parking lot. It is a large facility, but getting rid of the trash should be 1st on the list, instead it is piled by guest near stairways and other places. The time share itself is by far the worst. Law may limit them to 90 minutes, but their must be loop holes because ours was much longer. When we brought it to their attention, they kept giving one excuse after the next. The staff always look angry and are always dealing with guest complaints. I heard one staff member talking to another, saying "I stay as far away from this place as possible on the weekends, you could not pay me to stay here." That was enough for me

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.

We decided to book a room for a couple days while we were visiting disney because we drove by and the place looked beautiful! We were excited to know we would have a nice room when we were done at our exhausting day a Epcot. When we went to check in, it took FOREVER! we had 2 small children waiting in the car and they wanted to walk us to the room and tell us all about the property. Well, knowing better about pushy people, we said no and we would take our keys and find it ourselves. We only booked a studio since it was just my husband and children The studios are put together in pairs of two. you have to go through the main door to find apt A and B. well, when we went in to our rooms, it was later and we wanted to put our children to bed immediately. Unfortunately that wasn't possible. There was a family of about 10 in the one bed studio next to us and they kept running in and out and slamming the door and banging to get back in and when my husband was bringing in the last of our stuff, one of the kids next door ran into our room and tried taking my children's toys and the parent (or some sort of relative) just stood there laughing. Needless to say we wound up having to change rooms because it was not working out for us. We got to change rooms relatively quickly and settled into what we thought would be a better one. Well, apparently their pools don;'t close until around 11 or 12pm and you have people screaming at all hours of the night. So relaxing in a nice quiet room is impossible! On our last night (staying what we booked and NO MORE!) we got to listening to our "new" neighbors kids banging on the wall! Lovely! And there is also nothing to block the light from the room (No room darkening curtains). So sleep won't happen for a while. To top it off, whenever we walk to our car we get stared at because we seem to be the minority (we are Caucasian). My husband went to the car last night to get something out and there was a group of people that stood in his way and stared him down until he wound up just turning around because he said like he felt like he was going to get jumped. You know that really bad part of town that you never drive through because you are pretty sure you or your vehicle won't come out alive? Yea...this is that. We don't feel safe here at all and will never ever return. The only good is that the room seems to be relatively clean and the workers are nice....other then that, well, there's little left to be desired. Please don't bring your children here!

the rooms and amenties were very nice and not bad location

The condo was well equiped and clean, The pools are beautiful, most of all , the staff is very very nice and helpfull. It is in a perfect location for theme parks shopping dining. I would like to thank the staff for a great week (especialy the lady from haiti. Michael Edmiston

If you like bugs, poor food, drunken shuttle bus drivers, and resorts located in the middle of no where this is the place for you. Not to mention poor service.

We were placed in a room that had bugs. The dryer was burned out. and to top it off my sons DS games went missing. We contacted security they said they would look into it.We never got any reply. We called several times after our vacation and each time we were told no one knew anything. We never had any resolution to our problem.

I have stayed with my family of 5 at Westgate three times and will be staying there in 3 weeks for a fourth time. Every experience here has been great and the atmosphere and cleanliness are remarkable. They have numerous pools so you never feel like its crowded. Beautiful scenery and a great lake view! I recommend this resort for any family. Great, great, great!

First i will start with the parking it was not much of it and thats my only complaint . what i enjoyed was everything. my family of 7 . 3 adults and 4 kids came durning spring break and it was cold but the kids still enjoyed the pool and hot tub. we use the paddle boats and played tennis , rode bikes (my first time in 25 yrs) played putt putt . and basketball . this is the first time we stay at the resort and enjoyed all the amenties and not go to Disney and we saved lots of money. cooked dinner every night . all the amenties are a plus.