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We’re just back from SSIB, so I thought I would jot down some thoughts on the flight home.
I’ll caveat this review with a few points upfront, for context:
– we really like the Six Senses concept – the low key luxury vibe is one that resonates with us, and Seychelles and Douro Valley (thank you IHG intern rate 2021!) are two of our favourite hotels
– we have young kids, and this was a short break away from them for the first time ever. We had no intention of doing anything other than sleeping, eating, and going to the spa. Therefore I have absolutely nothing to say about activities outside of the hotel / what the local area is like
– I had read the reviews on TA etc from last year (and some this year) which were not all that complementary… They could be summarised as “the hotel and location are fantastic, but service is terrible, food is mediocre and supposed adults-only areas are overrun with kids.” As a result, I was a bit concerned, even going to far as to look at alternatives a couple of weeks out (7 Pines and the Mondrian specifically) as well as reaching out to the hotel to assuage my fears. It turns out that there is a new GM in place this year, and they responded to me directly, recognising some of the historic issues and explaining the changes they had made to improve them.
– Bloody hell, hotels have got expensive in the last few years! Expectations naturally follow price…
– Everyone knows that lists are bullshit. He who shouts loudest (and pays the most) gets the attention and accolades. Still, inclusion in the Worlds Top 50 Hotels list last year also sets expectations at a certain level.Overall, there was a lot to like about the hotel. Despite our undoubtedly poor experience with our original room (which was totally unacceptable for a hotel at this level), post our room change (a substantial upgrade – more later), I left feeling very positive overall about both the hotel and the service we received. I needn’t have worried about the reviews – while there is a kernel of truth in the issues raised, my experience was overall much more positive. In particular, I have only positive things to say about the food. That said, there are still some significant issues which really need to be addressed for the hotel to really justify it’s premium positioning. One of the top 50 hotels in the world?? I very much doubt it, certainly without fixing some of the issues. But, one of the top resort hotels in Europe I can believe. That is certainly within their grasp.
Getting there
A very straightforward 40ish minute Uber from IBZ. Uber cost c.EUR 70. If you want the hotel to collect you in a black Mercedes V Class then it’s EUR 205. Amusingly on our way back to the airport we went for an Uber premium as it had a shorter pick up time, and what appeared? A black Mercedes V Class, for EUR 80. Even more amusingly, out of it poured two girls in their early-20s, very dressed up, and clearly just getting back from the clubs at 9.15 am. I felt old.
Rooms
We booked into a Sea View Deluxe, as we liked the look of the substantial outdoor terrace and garden – given that it was just the two of us, we wanted the option to retire to our own space rather than having to be by the pool the whole time. According to the website, it has 290 sq ft inside space and 721 sq ft outside space. The room (on the top floor of the hotel) was perfectly adequate for two people – not massive, we were a bit short of wardrobe space and anywhere out of the way to put our 2 suitcases, but basically fine. I think that some rooms in this category have a bath, and some only have a large shower room. We got one with a shower, which was fine for us. What was fantastic was that outside space. A sofa in an initial terrace area shaded by a slatted roof, and then a step up to a garden area with a day bed, all overlooking the deep blue water of the bay. Bliss. Only there was a problem…
The smell.
The first time we noticed it we it wasn’t too intrusive, just a sense that there was cooking going on nearby. But it got worse through the first day, and by the time we were headed out for our evening meal there was a distinct, greasy smell of cooking – particularly fish – permeating our outside space. It was like (and I suspect this is the truth) the extractor for the kitchens exited on the roof just above us, and the air wasn’t being sufficiently scrubbed on the way out to remove the smell. The heavy, greasy air was then descending onto our garden area. I raised this with hotel, and was told maintenance would look into it. When we got back from dinner the smell was just as strong, but more beef this time, which was an improvement I suppose. Suffice to say that the clothes we had left on the balcony to dry now smelled very greasy. Not ideal.
It was late, so we went to bed, and by the morning there was no smell. Presumably also no cooking, but hey. We decided to see how it was in the afternoon before complaining again. When we got up from the pool post-lunch, the same smell of fish was back…
This was totally unacceptable for a hotel at this level, or any level really, so we headed down to reception to point this out and ask to be rehoused somewhere a bit less greasy.
The conversation didn’t get off to a great start. The guy on reception was a bit surprised, and wanted to help, but initially suggested that if we wanted to move to a room a category above we would have to pay the extra. Let’s try again, shall we? We escalated the discussion, pointing out that we would have been very happy with what we had paid for, but it wasn’t our fault that the terrace smelled like a cross between a chippie and a kebab shop.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, and pointing out our desire for a personal outdoor space, we managed to negotiate moving to a Sea View Premium Junior Suite (a four category upgrade), for no extra cost. I think my Ambassador status may have helped, but as much as anything else I think it was just that the hotel was clearly in the wrong, and we were polite and reasonable, but firm.
The Sea View Premium Junior Suite was basically the same as our original room, but bigger. 624 sq ft inside space (twice as big) and 958 sq ft outside space (1/3 bigger). It was absolutely fantastic. The extra space inside meant that we had all the space we could need for sleeping / lounging, there was a standalone roll-top bath, a wardrobe each, the same huge shower room, and more ‘living’ space in front of the bed. The outside space was of the same layout, just larger, but losing a couple of stories of height didn’t impact the view at all, and mercifully there was no smell! I genuinely can’t see how two people could need more space, or ask for anything more from a hotel ‘room’. Clearly once you get into suites or villas then things change, but as far as rooms go it was about as close to the pinnacle as I can imagine.
Spa
It’s a Six Senses, so I can’t not talk about the spa. There’s not much to say, other than it is fantastic. It is built on 3 levels, built into the cliff face, so while you enter from above, there is still natural light as you decend into the subterranean complex. There’s a beautiful steam room, infrared sauna, and a variety of treatment rooms. There are lots of places you can read about the spa – pretty much every review of the hotel majors on it, for good reason. It is a beautiful , calming space, and the staff were fantastic. A couple of things to note – the spa menu is 50 pages long, which gives you an idea of how seriously they take themselves, and cheap it ain’t, with a standard 60m massage at EUR 250 and up from there. I strongly recommend the hammam, which was a particular highlight.
Food & Drink
There are three restaurants, North (Israeli), The Orchard (Italian) and The Caves (modern European?), as well as a pool bar (lunch only). The restaurants open on a rotating basis – even in July they aren’t all open every evening. Breakfast is in another space called the Farmyard, complete with vintage tractor and an olive tree indoors. You have probably seen the photos.
Breakfast was very good, with a good buffet selection and options a la carte which included the typical egg dishes but also more typical Ibizan fare from the hotels own farm. Everything was of a very high quality, but in terms of range and my overall view it probably didn’t quite match the very, very best hotel breakfasts I have had (hi Park Hyatt Dubai). Also – their tea was fine, but why can no-one in Spain make decent coffee? How difficult can it be to have a few people properly trained as baristas?
I won’t go into detail about the other restaurants, other than to say that we found the previous reviews of the food to be off the mark. There is a new executive chef this year (to go with the new GM) and we found the quality of the food to be good, and really enjoyed our meals. Michelin guide / one star level maybe. Again, not cheap (especially Caves) – we didn’t spend less than EUR 250 on dinner any night we were there, and we generally weren’t ordering from the expensive end of the menu – albeit we were celebrating our freedom, so this includes cocktails and glasses of wine…).
Experiences
The hotel, as with other Six Senses arranges a daily schedule of experiences you can partake in, if you so choose. Things like morning yoga on the sun deck, snorkelling in the bay, an ebike tour of the surrounding area or a sunset ritual (don’t know what this is, we didnt go…). Some of these are free, some of them have a (low) cost, but are almost all focused on some element of sustainability or wellness. Some of them are very odd though – I mean, who goes on holiday and goes to a lip balm making workshop?? A special mention to the fact that the hotel has a subterranean cinema with about 50 seats, and while we were there they used it to screen matches from the Euros. Muoy bien!
Gym
The gym was a good size, with all new technogym equipment. It’s probably the largest hotel gym I have been in for a while. The busiest I saw it was with four people in at once and didn’t feel crowded. 3x treadmills, 1x rower, 2x bikes, 1x elliptical, 1x stair climber. Fixed squat rack (I.e. bar on runners). Free weights area is small, but has 3 benches and dumbbells from 2kg up to 30kg. No bars or bar weights. There was also a boxing ring and heavy bag outside if you like your workouts violent. Guest services were also happy to share running routes with me for the one day I did fancy going out for a run in the morning
Family friendly?
Is this a family friendly hotel? Maybe? There were certainly some families there, particularly with babies, and they seemed to be having a good time and the staff seemed really good with the little ones. I think it works fine for babies and maybe toddlers, but any older and I think they would get bored. Also, there a lot of stairs. I mean a lot. Everywhere you go is a workout. The hotel is built into a cliff, after all.
Overall, I would say that the hotel is really not set up to entertain children (there is a bleak play park, in full sun, beside the family pool, and it would have kept our 3yo entertained for about six minutes). On the topic of the ‘family pool’… This has recently been added, I presume in response to complaints of children overrunning the main pool and ruining the ‘luxury’ ambience. Which is a fair complaint. I love my kids, but I get how they could be disruptive to other people paying a grand plus a night to have a relaxing time… Only the family pool is so clearly an afterthought. It is right on the edge of the site, at the highest point of the site, nowhere near any food & drink outlets. And the only way to reach it is to climb about a hundred rough-cut wooden stairs. Because parents aren’t always carrying lots of stuff, and we haven’t worked out how to transport kids in wheeled transports called buggies yet… Oh… It’s a joke, and so while we were there I didn’t see a single family anywhere other than at the main pool. On one day the gate to the family pool was still locked at lunch time, hours after the pool should have been open and staffed.
Good
– Food
– Aesthetics / ambience / setting – this is a difficult one to pin down, and clearly subjective, but we found it to be a calming, relaxing, stress-free place. In some places it really was beautiful (take a look at some photos of North, with the long table running through a grove of olive trees), and all of the touch points exuded calm and luxury in an understated way
– Planting – the use of plants to decorate the space was pretty spectacular, it really creates the aesthetic. It will probably look even better in a year or two, as the flora fills in more in some areas
– Service recovery the issue we had with the terrace smell – ended up with a 4 category upgrade
– Wine by the glass – small range – generally only 3 white/red options plus 2 pink / fizz in each restaurant, but generally very good, and reasonably priced
– GymBad
– The Smell. I can’t believe we were the first people to complain about this, so it amazes me that they are continuing to sell the rooms impacted by this without having resolved it
– Soundproofing wasn’t as good as I want. I want to feel like my room is one of those sensory deprivation chambers, there should be total silence at night. If hotels beside motorways / airports can manage it… Here there was little noise from adjacent rooms, but people walking past in the corridor might as well have been walking around your bed, their conversation was that clear.
– Family pool, and family provision in general. It’s just not their target market.
– The beach. Or, more accurately, the fact that there is no beach. The pool is great, and you can get into the sea for a swim via a rocky plateau down a level from the pool area. This didn’t bother us, but if you need a beach then this hotel is not for you. There is a local beach a 10 min walk away, but you aren’t paying Six Senses prices to walk down to a local beach…
-Minibar. Free for a first fill, chargeable thereafter. Contains beer, sparkling water and lemonade. But they were drawer fridges, rather than the normal fridge set up with a door, and we found in both of our rooms they just wouldn’t stay totally shut, and so were never really cold enough.
– Price!Notable
– Staff – Restaurant staff are super enthusiastic, but young and inexperienced. Same for bell boys. Pool staff pretty useless – we got towels for ourselves every day – first world problems. Reception staff were generally a bit of a weak link – a bit standoffish and not as experienced as they should be.
– Huge array of room types – the hotel has 118 rooms, and 18 room types… If you are being generous, you could see this as ‘everyone will be able to find something to suit them’. I felt it was overly complex and meant we spent quite a lot of time trying to decide which room type to book.
– The app. Communication with the hotel is generally done via the Six Senses phone app. Response times were short, and the system worked very well for booking restaurant reservations, spa treatments etc. It also means everything is written down, which I find helpful. You don’t get the personal touch of a relationship with one or two Guest Experience Managers like we had in the Seychelles, but it was all nice and efficient, which on balance I prefer. The room key functionality on the app worked perfectly throughout.
– Boutique – not really my thing, but there is a large boutique if you want any holiday clothes or local nicnaks. The one thing I did want to buy was a hat, and they didn’t really have many options, when I thought would be a core part of the offering! Decent sized boutique in the spa too.
– North restaurant – we were guided that the concept was small plates, and we would need three per person. The plates were really not all that small, and this was way too much food
– Caves restaurant – this was genuinely small plates… You sit outside facing the sunset, so take sunglasses! It’s a beautiful view with the sun setting at the entrance to the bay
– Clientele – what a weird mix! Families with tiny babies, young rich people, old rich people. Quite a few May/December relationships. I would suspect some professionals… It was a younger, trashier (albeit that’s not a very kind word) crowd than I had expected, and moreso than the other SS hotels I have been to, but it is Ibiza. The crowd was quite similar to Soho House Miami. The people watching was entertaining!
– Rose Bar – this is a specific clinic focused on longevity treatments, where you can also get IV drips and various other things. We didn’t go in.One last note – IHG Ambassador status saved us quite a lot… Free breakfast, plus a choice of i) a free massage each, ii) a free experience or iii) EUR 100 F&B credit (always take the massage…). I don’t know the official breakfast rate, but let’s be conservative and say EUR 50pp, x2 ppl, x4 nights = EUR 400. Classic 60m massage is EUR 250, so that’s another EUR 500. Plus they added the EUR 100 F&B credit to the bill as well, so that’s EUR 1,000 of benefits for a USD 200 outlay… Plus I think it probably helped smooth the significant complimentary upgrade we received as service recovery. I appreciate that this is a bit of an unusual use case, but if you would have paid for breakfast, and would have paid for spa treatments, then it’s a pretty huge saving.
What a super review Toppcat. Thank you.
@Toppcat – to echo @LadyLondon , thank you for such a detailed review; if only all non-professional reviewers added as much value as you have. The bottom line, as I read it, is that the hotel just isn’t good enough in its category/price bracket and this is in a worrying trend as hotels have spotted just how many guests don’t know better. You should share your views with Neil Jacobs, CEO of Six Senses. He was a seriously brilliant hotelier and pioneer, but I fear he has succumbed to the IHG shilling. He will personally respond and he definitely needs to know the many crucial points you have made, good and bad.
Personally, I don’t think brands like Six Senses or Regent sit at all well in a global chain and the mess that is Intercontinental speaks volume about the priorities and standards of IHG plc.
@Toppcat – to echo @LadyLondon , thank you for such a detailed review; if only all non-professional reviewers added as much value as you have. The bottom line, as I read it, is that the hotel just isn’t good enough in its category/price bracket and this is in a worrying trend as hotels have spotted just how many guests don’t know better. You should share your views with Neil Jacobs, CEO of Six Senses. He was a seriously brilliant hotelier and pioneer, but I fear he has succumbed to the IHG shilling. He will personally respond and he definitely needs to know the many crucial points you have made, good and bad.
Personally, I don’t think brands like Six Senses or Regent sit at all well in a global chain and the mess that is Intercontinental speaks volume about the priorities and standards of IHG plc.
Agree wholeheartedly with this; but voted with my wallet. After a terrible Christmas at “Six Senses” uluwatu – another post IHG resort with no GEM’s and hotel room blocks. In Uluwatu I didn’t eat on Christmas Day as restaurant was booked out – no gem so no warning, no one answered room service line; my villa started to fall apart in rain and had broken tiles in the shower. Since then Aman has bene getting my money most vacations. Though I gave SS Koh Yao Noi a go in May; its a classic Six Senses, peaceful quiet low density hotel with GEMs, very wooden room and epic view. Though it desperately need refurbishing and the resort needed fogging; comparing mosquitos bytes was a topic of conversation in the bar most nights.
Not sure why being a new or existing SS resort makes any difference to them having GEMs or not
Surely if the guest experience management was being overlooked / cut it would be wholesale.
Not being funny but in most cases it’s just the cause of rapid expansion and not having the team in place to manage it ie the founder might have been able to invest energy into the next upcoming single property but they can’t into multiple ones and more likely they haven’t found the right team to oversee it YET.
Then there’s the problem of places like Ibiza being so seasonal and staff attrition / winter closures. I never think a hotel can truely offer great service when the staff are changing so often.
@TGLoyalty – what you say is correct but if a hotel wants to play and charge at this level, issues like staffing just have to properly addressed/managed, no ifs no buts.
GMs are paid very serious money to deal with this sort of stuff. The build issues such as inadequate sound insulation and kitchen ventilation entering the rooms is beyond inexcusable. It’s a combination of incompetence and cheapskating; totally amateur.
These newly invented titles like GEMs and butlers are a real nonsense. The finest hotels offered better service(s) before they came into existence.
You are totally right about the over expansion! Problem is you have a brand owner who really doesn’t care about quality or the long term health of the brand; they just want more fees now. It’s interesting in that Neil’s background is Four Seasons and he remains very pally with that chain which has gone unashamedly down the path of charge more/cut corners, the guests won’t notice/care.
The likes of Aman, Como. Dorchester, Peninsula and many others including independents will look on with amazement and delight.
Great review, hope you managed a decent amount of quality time despite the issues! Did you get breakfast as Ambassador or as Diamond, by the way?
I looked at the SS properties in Rome and Douro Valley recently in view of trips I’m planning next year, and I just don’t see how they can be worth the kind of prices they’re asking.
It seems to me nowadays that such places hope that influencer-types will give them loads of free publicity, followed by bookings from people who will apparently pay silly money to stay somewhere the influencer has basically been bribed to endorse.
In GCM last week there was much scorn in the comments under media articles about an American influencer who is being given a free hen weekend (or “bachelorette party” as she calls it, of course), in exchange for bigging up the island to younger travellers than it normally attracts. Someone pointed out that a resort in Mexico is paying for her wedding for very similar reasons!
@JDB and @LadyLondon – thank you for the kind words. Particularly from such venerable members of the community!
@u07ch – that is horrendous. Absolutely no surprise that you won’t be back! Thankfully, despite the negatives, my stay was nowhere near that bad.
Interesting point about ‘blocks of hotel rooms’ – I was going to include something about that in my review, but dropped it in the end. There’s no escaping that the Ibiza hotel is just a pile of shoeboxes stacked up, all facing the sea, much like pretty much any beach hotel anywhere in southern Europe. It’s about as nice as it can be within that framework, but it’s not exactly what I think of when I think of ‘Six Senses’.
All sounds totally bonkers to me, how can anyone travel and have no curiosity to step outside the hotel?
All sounds totally bonkers to me, how can anyone travel and have no curiosity to step outside the hotel?
First trip without the kids, @HampshireHog 😂
@JDB – yes, agreed re: luxury hotels as part of the larger groups. I was initially a bit concerned when IHG bought SS, but thought that the opportunity for outsized value redemption opportunities at SS hotels offset the concerns a bit.
Post closure of the IHG credit card, introduction of variable reward pricing, and the recent devaluation, it now all seems to be headed in one direction… Which is a real shame.
@HampshireHog And why not venture out of the hotel?
No kids for the first time since they arrived, as @NorthernLass says.
.. Or work in investment banking and just need to get out of London for a weekend. Just fly and… flop. Not even making it to the beach sometimes. Just catching up on sleep or with a partner.
Indeed @LadyLondon and @NorthernLass, all of the above! Not actually IB, but we both work in similar sorts of jobs… Plus having two nursery age kids. Tired doesn’t even start to cover it!
I get it re chillaxing, but for me when that’s my goal I’d rather head for a country house hotel in the UK rather than run the gauntlet of air travel and time to travel to/from an overseas hotel just to stay inside the wire! Horses for courses I guess.
P.S. a really nice Airbnb and a hamper of goodies has been a great bit of downtime for us in the Lakes and NorthumberlandI don’t think they were actually staying indoors the whole time; I imagine the Balearic climate had something to offer over the north of England (we had half a day of sunshine here today, the first for a while, but then it clouded over after lunch and then started raining, and still is).
@HamshireHog if only we had a summer 🙂 so countryside hotels were a good idea
Indeed – the Six Senses Irwell Valley would give Douro Valley a run for its money!
@NorthernLass – I totally missed your question about breakfast – apologies.
Sadly I am no longer Diamond due to a combination of the loss of the credit card, plus the ambassador trick ceasing to work. For the first time in years and years I am not top tier with IHG 🙁
I did ask in advance the difference between the benefits for Ambassador and Diamond though – copied below. I hope it’s useful!
Ambassador
– Upgraded wellness platter with handwritten card;
– Late check-out at 4pm subject to availability.
– Early check-in at 10:00 subject to availability
– Room Upgrade subject to availability.
– Free Breakfast at Farmers Market;
– 50 minute massage per person complimentary OR free experience or 100€ to spend in F&B.Diamond
– Upgraded wellness platter with handwritten card;
– Late check-out at 2pm subject to availability.
– Early check-in at 10:00 subject to availability.
– Room Upgrade subject to availability.
– Free Breakfast at Farmers Market;
– 30 minute head massage per person complimentary OR reflexology for two.Come to think of it, I didn’t get my upgraded wellness platter…
Thanks for coming back with that one! So Ambassador gets free breakfast at SS – that does ring a bell actually, from when SSDV was being reviewed on here a couple of years ago.
I think you get breakfast at six senses on all cash rates. Never not seen it included in the room; only fair when rooms are usually north of 1000£ a night. As someone that doest like massages I do like the get 100$ back on bill though its bad news for FHR / Virtuoso as the benefits are basically better on SS direct.
At Koh Yao Noi the wellness platter was a different selection of nuts and cookies in sealed jars, and a bottle of local whiskey. Taking wellness in a different direction 🙂
@u07ch – fair point about breakfast being included in the rate. Maybe I am overstating the Ambassador value a bit… But even the free spa treatments by themselves works out very well for us!
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