Thailand - Renaisannce Phuket and JW Marriot Khao (Page 1 or 2)

One bedroom Ocean view villa @ Renaissance Phuket, Thailand

Our adventure to Thailand...we stayed at two Marriot hotels, both pretty fantastic in their own way.

The first and last was the Renaissance in Phuket , we stayed here the first 3 days then went to Khao Lat and stayed at the JW Marriot Khao Lat then returned to the Renaissance in Phuket.

Both are beautiful resorts in their own unique way.

Phuket Beach

Entrance to Renaissance Phuket

The Renaissance was smaller and much more modern with the best parts being the private waterfront villa with pool and the amazing breakfast buffet at Loca Vore (1 of 3 restaurants on site) consisting of amazing fresh tropical fruits, smoothly and juice bar, omelette station, salad station, dessert station, juices, Thai dishes, pastry buffet, and more.  The restaurants on site are pretty good as well however not quit as good as going off the resort which requires a cabby to stay with you, in that he sits in the parking lot while you are in the restaurant eating and wait to take you back to the resort so you don't end up in the wrong hands like broken palace or some human trafficking incident.  This really puts us at ease, it was heart warming to know how well the Marriot hotels take care of their guests well being and safety.

View from inside the villa to the pool

How does transportation work: the Renaissance has a shuttle that takes you to shopping areas nearby for free as well as sister resorts (which I will mention later). If you are planning to go off the resort, they arrange a driver for you for a standard fee that stays with you throughout your trip to ensure that you get back to the resort safely.  We even opted to get a driver that drove us to Khao Lat and he was going to pick us up 3 days later, during the to Khao Lat, the driver can take you site seeing or whatever you want for the same rate, not like our taxi here where you pay for one way. There, you pay for his entire day for the same price as a one way trip.

Sister resorts:  Marriot hotels are big and world wide, so when you stay at a close by resort, you can venture over to the sister resorts and use their amenities (I.e., pools, restaurants)

We wandered over two sister resorts in Phuket, one was Marriot Vacation club, one was Marriot, both were pretty amazing.  We also wandered to a nearby resort not related to Marriot and was super happy that we chose to stay with Marriot.

Restaurant on site that is worth trying:
Loca Vore - which where they serve an amazing international breakfast buffet, lunch and dinner
Takieng - an al cart menu of Thai food, also amazing and worth trying, however, as you may or may not aware, food on resorts are much pricier than offsite restaurants. With that said, you would need a driver to go offsite unless you rented a car which we did not.

Restaurant off site that we ventured to with our driver in Phuket:
We love Kindee restaurant:  my favorite was the wing beans dish, amazingly good and since I been back to the states, the closet restaurant that had this dish is in Portland, Oregon (Pok Pok) 
We took the shuttle over to a JW Marriot Phuket, a sister resort for a JW Japanese Sunday Brunch at their Kabuki Japanese Cuisine theatre (reservations are needed and very pricey even in Thailand)

Kabuki

Page 2...for JW Marriot Khao Lat

Beijing Airport (Good and Bad)!!

My husband and I recently traveled to Phuket, Thailand using Hainan Airlines with an 8 hours layover in Beijing Airport.

What can I say about traveling with this airline and being in Beijing airport? I will start with telling you about Beijing airport.

All around, I would not recommend having a layover in Beijing to my worst enemy.  Why, you may ask?

Beijing is the most disorganized airport with its process. We have traveled extensively for work and pleasure, and never have we experienced such disorganization.

Beijing Airport needs to put a better process in place for their immigration and transfer flights process. 

We must have gone through a total of 3 different gates for immigration each time we connected in Beijing, scanning out passports then re-scanning then picking up our luggage and re-checking it in.

Our luggage were not transferred like they had told us, instead, we had to pick up our luggage in Beijing and take them through the entire process of check-in and ticketing, that means, exiting to leave and re-checking in and going through all the security scans as if we just got to the airport.

You will need at least 2 hours if you have a layover in Beijing to get through their ridiculously disorganized security process for scanning your luggage over and over and processing your passports.  Additionally - flying with Hainan, you will not be able to get your boarding passes a head of time, so if you flown in like we did from the States to Beijing then Phuket to Beijing, we had to wait 3 hours outside of the terminal before we can get our tickets to go through the terminal that we would be able to fly out of. So for those frequent flyers or travelers, if your think that you would be able to spend your layover time in a one of those comfortable airline lounges to pass time, well sadly, you will not have that opportunity and be prepared to spend 3 hours just sitting around uncomfortable chairs and be rudely cut off by native folks. 

My husband decided to tent in front of the ticketing line before anyone else was even there for an hour before Hainan airline attendants showed up and much to our surprise, the minute these Hainan attendants showed up, an entire Chinese family ran to the gate with all their luggage and put them on these scales (2 lines to be exact including one we were standing in front of) with no regard to the fact that we have been standing in line all this time.  So we quickly learned that it’s like the survivor of the fittest at this airport, the people as well as the actual airport itself just have no regard or respect for a process or for other people.  We quickly put our luggage on the scale next to the line we were in since these folks took ours.  Ironically, one of the lines they put their luggage on, were for a single traveler, they looked over to ours with disappointment that we had already put ours on there as they would have tried to take advantage if we weren't so quick to learn from them, we would have had no opportunity of getting our luggage checked in as well.  Furthermore, by the time our attendant started the checking process, this tall Chinese woman rudely went up to him to tell him that he needed to hurry it up after she had cut off 2 other families standing behind us.  Again – it’s really survivor of the fittest at this ridiculous airport with their rude natives.

Also-if you are considering taking one of those tours that are posted online about having 8 hours - 10 hours layover to the Great Wall of China, don't do it because you will not have time to based on the process they have at this airport, you would be wasting your money and missing your flight. We were considering doing a tour until we realized what chaos it was to be at this airport.

Hainan Airlines:

Upon getting on the plane, the flight attendants are no joy either, rude and snippy people.  Seats are tiny, bathrooms were not clean and smells incredibly horrible and the food. it was tasteless. 

On our flight returning from Beijing to the States, there was one person sitting in business class, my husband proceeded to request the flight attendant how much to sit up there and she flat out, just signal her hands as in no, not up for discussion, so very rude, flat out dismisses his question all together. 

The only pro on this airline is they did a decent job with their movie selection for in flight entertainment.