On the plus side, the Skyline Vista Villas lives up to its name with a skyline location on the top of a mountain in the middle of St. Thomas with a beautiful vista of the gorgeous Caribbean Sea below. Most rooms have a balcony with chairs that encourage people to enjoy the view. However, there is much about this particular hotel that does not quite live up to its promises or price. When we arrived at the location we found a building on the side of the mountain with steep stairs (no elevators, alas), and a complicated check-in experience that required three calls to the remote customer desk and that also included filling out a registration form and attaching a photo of a passport on my smart phone because the wifi instructions were located inside the room that we could not yet access.

In addition to that, we found that the rooms were, to put it mildly, a bit on the janky side. For example, none of the plugs available for use in our particular room worked aside from the one already being used for the television. This made charging up the laptop and phone a bit of a challenge, to say the least. In addition to this, the bathroom had a broken shower stall that required the use of a latch on the shower head to get cold water (no heat, alas). On top of all this, the instructions contained with information on nearby attractions and restaurants assumed that one would be able to walk anywhere–which is not the case on steep and narrow mountains road roads like the ones around the hotel–and furthermore were from the main location of the hotel and not the far more remote location of our particular rooms. In short, there is a lot of false advertising going on here that decreased from the housing experience.

By the time that the second day was over at the hotel I had called the staff five times. They hung up on my mother and then tried to weasel out of the cold shower problem, only to comment that they had tried a quick fix in maintenance, without ever bringing it up to us, which seems like a major mistake. The issues that we have had with the hotel stem in large part from the remoteness of the staff of the hotel to us in the location. It is hard to fix such a problem given the layout of this business to begin with, but having the staff be easy to communicate only through the phone and not seeing them face to face at all is definitely a mistake.