La Cabana Beach Resort Trip Report
Sent in by: Francine
We were in Aruba on the dates mentioned above. This time we stayed at La
Cabana instead of the Bushiri. The hotel complex is nice but we won't be
going there again. We were staying in 'phase II' the furthest away from the
beach. It took us more than 5 minutes to get to the beach, after a long walk
to the one working elevator we had to go through what I guess is Phase I,
then cross 1 private road and 2 lanes of public road to get to the beach,
just too much. God forbid if we forgot something in our room!
We had the 'all inclusive' package. Because this
resort has all sorts of
different packages from pay for everything to part inclusive to all inclusive it doesn't
work well. We were restricted to one restaurant for breakfast, we could have lunch at
either the Captain's table or the Pool Grill. For dinner we were only allowed to eat the
'buffet' at either. We had 2 coupons for 'a la carte' but even there, there was a
surcharge depending on what you ordered.
The drinks are included as long as you order the
'house' brands. On the same
night for the same drinks we were sometimes charged $1 extra and sometimes not, go figure!
Even though you're not paying, you still have to sign for everything and if there are 2
people in the room you can only get 2 of the same items at the coffee shop, e.g. 4 beers
is not allowed at one time when there's only 2 people. Since our room was so far from
everything making multi trips is not something we wanted to do. Thankfully they have a
convenience store so we bought in bulk there to save on the number of trips. 'all
inclusive' really wasn't as inclusive as all that. At the Pool Grill they have 2 or 3
'theme' nights for which you need reservations. Now this place isn't very big so there's
no way to fit everybody so I guess some people are out of luck. We didn't bother, too much
planning for a vacation. The Arowak hut however did have good pizza and that is
part of the 'all inclusive'.
The service in the main restaurants was very slow
and we didn't particularly
find any of the people all that friendly and helpful. It almost seemed that
if you weren't actually 'paying' for the meals that you didn't stand a chance.
They automatically add a 12% surcharge to all the bills whether you like it
or not. If you don't get all inclusive (with its drawbacks) be prepared to pay a
minimum of $25 US for breakfast and lunch and at least twice that for dinner. A hot dog is
$6.50 and a hamburger is $8.50US so anything substantial is bound to cost a lot.
Unfortunately it was very cloudy and not as warm
as it was last time we were
there but as always Aruba is very nice. If you want a nice horseback ride on well treated
horses, do give 'Rancho Notorious' a try.
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