Friday, April 29, 2011

Wyndham Ocean Walk Resort

This post is an FYI for all Trendwest WorldMark owners who are considering staying at the Ocean Walk resort in Daytona, Florida. Since I have several extended family members who are members, I wanted to make sure they had more information than we did about choosing this resort to stay at.

The resort itself was quite nice. There were 4 pools and several hot tubs, a kiddie area and a water slide. There was a lazy river, but it was closed. The beach was on the other side of the pool. There was a free mini golf course.

Downsides:

There is no free internet for TravelShare members. There is free wifi in the bottom two levels, but it sucks. If you want in-room internet, you'll be paying for it.

This is apparently a Wyndham resort, not a Worldmark Resort. Worldmark has two floors.

If you want to use a luggage cart to bring your bags in, you have to leave photo id at the pool towel desk to check it out. They do not tell you this at check-in.

You may only have one car in the parking terrace. If you have more than one you have to park in another lot. They do not validate for this service. They do not tell you that they don't validate at check-in.

They charge a $150 deposit to your credit card when you check-in. They don't really tell you that at check-in either.

You have to sign out your pool towels and take them back to the pool towel counter. If you are a Worldmark member you can trade your towels in once. If you are a Wyndham member, those are your towels for the week.

There were only vending machines on the bottom floor and the 10th floor, even though each floor has a spot for a vending machine.

Worldmark Members get at 12:00 noon checkout, but you might be ahead to put your own do not disturb sign on the door because housekeeping starts coming around at 9:00am. Wyndham members check out at 10.

Your key will stop working exactly at checkout time. So if you are in the parking garage and you need to return the luggage cart, you will have to push the cart through the entire parking structure to go into the front of the resort. You have to do this so you can get your id back.

This is a really large resort, and when we were there a national cheerleading competition checked in. It wasn't that crowded before that. From what I understand this is a common occurrence.

They tell you they have a gift basket and a check-in survey for you—it's really an attempt to get you into a Wyndham presentation.

The resort itself was nice, but I am really leering about Wyndham now owning Worldmark because their policies suck. Usually when we leave a resort we are already planning our next trip. The annoying policies with OceanWalk have put me off travel at the moment. I don't even want to plan next year's Spring Break.

On the web-site Ocean Walk was not really designated as an affiliate site. Its dot was exactly the same shape and color as all of the other Worldmark resorts, although the salesperson for Wyndham argued with us that it wasn't. I double checked it after he left.

I am planning to call Worldmark to double check what the salesman told us, which was Worldmark is no longer expanding and all the new resorts will be Wyndham ones. I really hope he's wrong, and was just trying to get us to buy into Wyndham, which I wouldn't recommend doing based on our experience at this resort. We have never had an issue at any other Worldmark resort that we stayed at that wasn't resolved immediately, usually involving broken blinds or burnt out bulbs.

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