Guest User
February 29, 2024
If you are looking for a 5 star luxury experience that is the same everywhere in the world, choose a different place. If you want to experience real Fiji with authentically kind staff and in an authentic, relaxing beach environment, with just a few guests, stay here. It is about a two hour drive from Nadi airport to get to the resort and it is the start of an authentic Fiji experience (we rented a car so we drove to the resort ourselves). We drove down narrow country roads where street markets were abundant, the Fijians and stray dogs walked alongside the roads in the numerous villages, farm animals grazed, and dense jungles and open ocean vistas were observed. Next we found the narrow dirt road down to the resort. This set the tone for our stay. We just spent 4 nights in 2 beachfront bures with our teenage sons and were treated like VIPs. This is a very small family-owned resort that just reopened for business on Dec. 24, 2021 after being closed for 20 months and so they are working to bring the resort back to it's glory days. You have to give these small resorts credit for surviving during the shutdown and still reopening. Having said that, we were treated like gold here, and Ed and his staff bent over backwards to make us comfortable. During our stay only the beachfront and Oceanview bures were open, thus there were just a handful of guests around making it delightful to get to know everyone. Despite previous reviews, the photos of our beachfront bures were accurate, just missing the bed netting. The bures have thatched roofs so they were naturally dark (someone complained about this in an early review) but they were unique to stay in and contributed to the authentic feel. They were simple with a comfortable bed, lights, an overhead fan and a working mini-fridge. Each bure has an outside shower (again, fun and unique). We always had hot water. I must admit that without a fan blowing it can get very buggy inside the bures as there is an open gap between where the wall tops out and the roof comes down. My sons were eaten alive on the first night because they didn't have the fan going. The next night staff made sure the fan was working, gave us mosquito coils for the rooms, and bug spray. That took care of that problem. And having the opening in the bure let the sounds of the waves flood in. As for customer service, Ed went far out of his way to recommend and arrange activities for us, fix transportation issues for us, and make repeated calls for us to make sure everything was OK with our next hotel (which we heard may be closed). He and activities staff kept my teenage boys engaged and off their devices. Speaking of devises, there is no TV on site (which we loved), limited wifi (we used our cell service most of the time when we needed to be connected), so it was nice to really power down and reconnect with each other. We brought cards and played with each other and other guests in the evenings in the dining room. When my sons got sunburnt,