Grand Palladium Imbassai Resort & Spa

First off, if you are an American (white) who speaks English, good luck! It was very hard to find anyone who spoke English, but we were able to get past that. We were absolutely astonished how prejudiced the majority of the resort was towards us. From servers at restaurants to bartenders, etc. we felt disrespected and looked down upon our entire trip.

I’ll start off from the beginning – there were 5 couples in our “party” – 10 people total. Upon arrival and check-in, 2 out of the 5 rooms were nice and those 2 couples did not have any complaints. The 3 other rooms ranged from “OK” to “Absolutely disgusting”. One of the rooms had dirty sheets (stains), no working phone and the fold-out couch was left un-made and folded out, one of the rooms had a broken sink that would not drain and the air conditioning barely functioned and the third room was flat-out disgusting – the bed had not been made with clean sheets, the bathroom was not even cleaned from the previous guest with “splatter” in the toilet… to keep things PG. Neither the shower nor sinks were cleaned and the used shampoo, soaps and conditioner were not replenished.

Next up came attempting to speak to someone at the front desk about getting our rooms taken care of (as they already should have been when we arrived!). That was an adventure in itself as when we called to the front desk asking for someone who spoke English, we’d either be put on hold for 3-5 minutes before they hung up, or they would just hang up right away. After a few attempts, we finally got ahold of someone, lodged our requests/complaints and tried to settle in. Maintenance was relatively quick, our room got our sheets changed out quickly and there were no problems there. The room which was never cleaned took longer, as expected, but it was cleaned. As for the broken sink and broken phones, neither of these problems were ever fixed over the duration of our trip (we asked at least once per day about the phone, receiving different excuses each time).

The grounds and layout of the resort are nice. The pools were laid out nicely as well. You have to walk on a board-walk down to the beach, but we knew that already and we got to see some wild monkeys a few times which was fun. The beach area is nice with plenty of chairs and space for everyone. When we were served drinks, they were as expected, if not a bit stronger. We had no complaints about the grounds themselves or the alcoholic drinks. There seemed to be quite a bit of construction going on while we were there, but that is hard to avoid and will hopefully lead to good things for the resort – they appeared to be building a kids’ play area while we were there.

Onto the food… we have stayed other places at All Inclusive resorts and we all realized coming in that the food is not going to be spectacular. However, we definitely expected a lot more. The nicest thing I can say about the buffets from day-to-day is that they were simply not good. There were a few things each day which were “OK”, but never anything that made us want to go back for seconds. The individual cooking stations were also generally “OK”, but far from “good”. The sushi restaurant was pretty good, though all of the portions were quite small. We were pleased with our experience there until we noticed the chef preparing all of the sushi was not wearing gloves and touching the raw food with his bare hands. DISGUSTING!! This made us a bit uneasy after eating all of the food before noticing. The Brazilian BBQ restaurant has a nice location – on the beach. That is the only good thing about this restaurant though. The beach where it was located was full of ants, so we were bitten by ants during our meal. The meal itself was not good – the “sides” were most of the same dishes from the buffets, only this time they ranged from not very warm to cold since the food is setup outside at this restaurant. The cuts of meat were nothing special with most of the steak being rubbery and chewy. We have had Brazilian BBQ in the U.S. and we had Brazilian BBQ in Brazil – this restaurant was not even close in quality. However, this was the one restaurant we had great waiter service in. We had stayed in another part of Brazil earlier in the week and were able to try a lot of different local Brazilian food which we enjoyed, so the problem with the food was not just that it was “different” from what we are used to back at home.

Making reservations for restaurants was pretty simple up in the lobby, though it was quite odd how empty all of the restaurants were. We were not actually told that the Japanese restaurant had hibachi-style food/service, however, we found out they did and wanted to try it. When we tried to book it, it was “fully booked up”, though when we dined in the Japanese restaurant at that same time we had tried to book the hibachi, we noticed that both the Japanese sushi and the hibachi parts of the restaurant were both almost completely empty. The same held true for the Brazilian BBQ restaurant – almost nobody there. We attempted to ask if we could walk-in and try one of the restaurants without a prior booking but were told it was full (when we could look in and clearly see it was not) and that we would not be admitted without a prior reservation receipt.

We were happy to find out upon arrival that the hotel had free Wi-Fi everywhere (lobbies, restaurants, rooms, etc.). However, the Wi-Fi seldom worked during the day, the only time we were able to reliably get onto the Wi-Fi was late at night (11 pm or later).

As I mentioned in the beginning of my review, service (lack thereof) was our number one complaint on this trip. There were many times where we would go to the bar and wait for long periods of time before being served. The bartenders would routinely serve other people and we were almost always the last ones served. The service at the buffets was just as bad, if not worse. There were multiple times where my wife and my father both actually got up themselves to pour their own coffee and I poured water for our table multiple times also after growing tired of waiting to be served. Now, as I mentioned, we are from America and speak English with almost no Portuguese. However, we still made an attempt. We learned how to ask for water and how to ask for coffee in Portuguese and we always made sure to ask politely and be polite to the wait staff. By the end of the trip though, we were fed up to be honest. We would ask for coffee or water and the staff would simply not bring anything to us. This happened every single time we were without my brother’s Brazilian wife. If she was there with us, we generally got much better service, more along the lines of what we would expect. If my brother and his wife were off doing other things, those of us who went to eat were treated terrible and given horrendous service, being treated as though we were an inconvenience to the wait staff.

On the second to last day of our stay, my wife and I noticed a very bad smell in our room. Luckily 2 of our other 5 rooms were next to our room, so I could use their phones (remember, our phone was broken the entirety of our stay). After plenty of being put on hold and back-and-forth, we got maintenance to come. We are not entirely sure what they said about the smell, but I think it is safe to assume there was some kind of dead animal smell since my father said he had seen a few maintenance men walking out of the building earlier in the day with smaller boxes which could be used for disposal of a smaller dead animal. Realizing these things happen, we tried to “go with the flow” and simply asked for another room so we could sleep without that smell before leaving. They did give us a room down the hall, which was fine. We were happy at first since this room had much better lighting than the other 5 and generally seemed like a “nicer” room overall. However, when I showered the next morning, I noticed that the water was dripping out of the side of the shower and onto the floor… perhaps that is why the room was open when we needed to move originally.

Before we were leaving and checking out (day prior), we told the front desk when we were checking out, when our transportation was to get to the airport, etc. The bellboys all seemed to work hard and the ones I saw did a good job. None of them was complaining while sweating in the heat carrying heavy luggage around. They were also quite nice whenever we saw them. The only complaint here was that they were late, but we had built in enough time that it was not a problem.

I know for a fact that my family can be very picky and hard to please, myself included. However, nothing that went wrong or that we complained about was overly nit-picking and are things that generally should not happen. We did not expect gourmet food with it being an All Inclusive, but this was very subpar. We did, however, expect to arrive to clean rooms, which did not happen. We worked around our broken sinks and phone during our stay, however, these are things one should not have to “work around” when paying a large amount of money to stay at a resort. Worst of all was the way we were treated. Honestly, it was unbelievable and hard to describe in words. We have been other areas in the world and have never been treated the way we were here – disrespected and blatant prejudice our entire stay. Overall, you could not pay me to go back here and I would caution any Americans (white) who do not speak Portuguese to pick somewhere else. Now I cannot speak for anyone else, but when I go on vacation, I do not expect to get disrespected and treated like garbage at a resort I am paying good money to stay at.

We stayed at this resort a month ago now and I waited to post my review because I wanted to be able to calm down and make sure I could be as impartial as possible in my review and not let my bitter emotions take over from right after the trip. It is tough to put into words how disappointed my whole family was with our trip.