I am a pretty simple person. I have foregone the fancy things in life ever since I abandoned a 6-figure job in the states in order to take on a scuba-diving job that paid $30 a day back in 2004. It isn't that I don't like fancy things, I just think they are overpriced and often not as good as things that cost a lot less.
I have a pool on the roof of my condo and the ocean is a block away from my balcony so when someone offered me the opportunity to go to Premiere Village Resort in Da Nang I was initially intrigued. It's been so long since I have done anything fancy that I was expecting a luxurious experience second-to-none.
So I met up with them and decided to go have a look at this wonderful place where we were going to have drinks and lunch as well as hang out by what is mean to be an amazing pool.
We started things off by being stopped at the security gate of this massive plot of land on the beach. My motorbike taxi apparently already knew the deal here because he didn't try to go beyond the security gate. I waited here for my friend because she had a QR code booking that was going to get us into the property.
You jump on one of the limo golf-carts and they take you to the restaurant that you want to visit. The property is absolutely massive so I am glad we had a ride. It was really hot and the restaurant was quite far away.
Along the way we passed by the rental properties and I gotta say, this is not your typical hotel. These were massive villas and most of them had their own pool.
Upon arriving at the beachside pool/bar/restaurant I was still quite impressed and thinking that this was going to be a great day out. I expected things to be more expensive here because that is just the nature of the game at hotels around the world.
23k VND is roughly $1 US so these prices are not outrageous with a Tiger Draught beer costing around $4. But when you consider that most of the places I hang out at this same beer is $1, I was already a bit annoyed. This wasn't a game-ender for me though, that would come much later in the process. My irritation began when it took something absurd like 5 minutes for us to get a draught beer, a coke, and a vodka with soda. We were at the bar as well and there were 4 bartenders and the place was not slammed.... they are just very badly disorganized.
As you can tell from this picture, the place wasn't really even very busy but the fact that it took 5 times as long for me to get a simple beverage than it would have taken at any of my usual dive bars was not a good sign.
Once we were seated the service dwindled even further.
It was a lovely environment and was reasonably cool being right next to the beach but once our beverages ran dry it was impossible to get the attention of any staff members for a refill. Perhaps it sounds like I am being fussy here but we had to walk on the hot pavement all the way back to the bar to get another drink. When you are charging 5x the price of smaller places I feel like your level of service needs to be significantly better than this.
The food was disgusting. I didn't even bother to take a picture of it but the fried calamari, which is something that should be very easy to pull off in any establishment, was clearly frozen store-bought rings and by the time it got to me it was cold. What do you serve as a dipping sauce with friend calamari? Well, I don't know for sure but I am pretty sure it isn't ketchup - which is what I received.
It didn't come as much of a surprise that when we left that our bill was completely wrong as well. 30% of the drinks we had were not on the bill and I wasn't going to point that out to them since I was already very irritated about the extremely piss-poor service. With this terrible service came a 15% service charge as well and honestly, they do not deserve that.
My friends pay for a membership here and have since then invited me back a number of times. I have joined them once because I wanted to try out my boogie-board. I didn't order a single drink while I was there though because there isn't a point. If I order a $4 draught, I expect it to not be warm and take 10 minutes to arrive.
When they invite me in the future I will likely decline. I see no reason to go to this place and if the level of service here is a representation of what it is like at the other fancier places in town, I will stick to my dive bars thank you very much!
I'm not even going to tell people where this place is because I can see no reason to go there.