384leonardob2026-10-02
The most inhospitable hotel in the Caribbean.
Dear Tortuga Bay management,
We are writing to express our deepest indignation and total disappointment regarding our stay at your facility, which proved to be severely below the minimum standards one would expect from a 5-star hotel of your prestige and rates.
We had planned to spend two weeks at the Tortuga Bay Hotel, incurring a significant expense for a vacation dedicated to comfort, relaxation, and exclusivity. However, the conditions encountered were so unacceptable that they forced us to leave the facility after just one week, giving up half of the already paid, planned stay.
And incurring further expenses for changing the previously purchased flights.
The hotel beach was completely unusable due to the enormous amount of sargassum seaweed. The smell was nauseating and made it impossible to spend time outside or use the essential services for which we had chosen and paid for your facility.
Making the situation even more intolerable was the continuous passage of tractors, from the early hours of the morning, back and forth in front of the hotel to remove the seaweed. The noise prevented us from sleeping and resting, turning what should have been a relaxing stay into an extremely stressful, frustrating experience unworthy of the level that Tortuga Bay claims to represent.
As if that were not enough, around 7 a.m. the seaweed was burned, spreading a persistent and nauseating smell of smoke and burning throughout the area. These conditions are absolutely incompatible with the image, level, and rates of Tortuga Bay. It is unacceptable that guests of a facility defined as luxury are forced to endure deafening noises, bad odors, and a completely unusable beach.
Even more serious was the total lack of assistance from management. For the first four days, no one bothered to contact us, inform us adequately, or personally verify the conditions in which we were forced to stay. This silence was unacceptable and demonstrates a worrying lack of attention toward guests, as well as a completely negligent and irresponsible handling of the problem.
Only after four days of continuous complaints did the manager—if we can call him that—Mr. Thomas Desroches, finally show up. The solution proposed for such a serious inconvenience was a massage at the Spa. We consider this proposal not only insufficient but deeply offensive and mortifying, as it demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the gravity of the situation and the damage suffered.
A massage cannot in any way compensate for an unusable beach, the deafening noise of tractors at dawn, the nauseating odors, the lack of rest, and the loss of a week of vacation. Presenting such a gesture as compensation for a service failure of this magnitude seemed almost like a mockery of us and a further sign of how much management underestimated the situation.
The entire handling of the matter highlighted a structure that is not serious and barely professional, incapable of addressing an obvious problem that is seriously damaging to the guest experience with timeliness, transparency, and responsibility. The management's behavior demonstrated a worrying lack of respect for customers and a total disproportion between the image of exclusivity that the property claims to offer and the service actually received.
From a property that presents itself as exclusive and luxurious, we would have expected professionalism, timeliness, concrete assistance, and a real taking charge of the problem. Instead, we received silence, indifference, and a ridiculous proposal that was absolutely disproportionate to the gravity of the facts.
Furthermore, the manager told us that the situation related to the sargassum had only started about fifteen days ago. This statement is totally false and is in clear contrast with what has been publicly documented for months by the authorities and the press of the Dominican Republic.
The sargassum phenomenon was in fact already the subject of official monitoring and wide public attention since the month of April, well before our arrival, and it has been repeatedly reported as a problem of significant environmental, tourist, and economic importance for the country.
We therefore consider it extremely serious that the manager, instead of facing the situation with transparency, provided his guests with information that does not correspond to what is available from publicly available sources. This behavior further compromised our trust in the management and gave us the feeling that there was a deliberate attempt to minimize the real extent and duration of a problem that has been known for months.
The icing on the cake was on the day of departure; after paying an exorbitant amount of nearly 2,000 dollars extra, we asked for a glass of water, and after offering it, they arrived with the bill to make us pay for it.
THEIR INHOSPITALITY IS SHOCKING TO SAY THE LEAST
