I’ve seen people on trips in Turks and Caicos and on my bucket list it went, wishing I could to go there someday. Well, we were reaching our 10 year wedding anniversary and I thought, THIS IS THE DAY! Grace Bay Beach, in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, is one of the best beaches in the world, so heck yes!

We wanted this trip to be a very romantic, relaxing, and a whole-bunch-of-doing-nothing-except-laying-out-on-the-beach kinda trip. And that, it was. 

I’ve always dreamed of staying in a beachfront room. Thinking it’ll be almost like having a private beach, where you walk out onto the beach right from your patio. From my research, not too many resorts had a beachfront room. Alexandra Resort did and it was on the list of one of the top resorts on the island. It was also in the Costco travel guide, so it must be good, right? (The Costco special did not provide a beachfront room though). We still chose to stay at Alexandra Resort in a beachfront room, all-inclusive! All inclusive was something that was on my list of priorities. I didn’t want to leave the resort to look for places to eat at. I wanted it to all be right there. So lazy of me, right? But that was my goal for the vacation. Haha. We booked this trip using BookIt. We booked the room, the flight, ride from airport and back, as well as the sunset cruise all at one time, in one place.

Upon our arrival at the resort…

My first impression of the place was, “really?? This is it?” It didn’t look very resort-y to me. It had more of a hotel or apartments feel. We were led into an office, which had very low ceilings, it made it look a little like a mobile home. A girl served us with a warm wet towel to wipe our hands and welcome drinks. We got our room key and were led to the room.

Walking into the room, first thing I looked for is the view of the beach/ocean. But to my surprise I saw bushes and tops of umbrellas!! Not an ocean in sight. And if you wanted to get to it from your patio, you’d have to climb over the wall of bushes and then another hill of grassy sand. In other words, there was no beach access through the patio. So disappointing! On top of that, the layout of the room felt very much like an apartment, where the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen/living room were all separate rooms with regular doors, not at all like a resort or even hotel.

A week before we left for this trip, the resort contacted us to let us know that their pool is under construction, but we would be able to use the pools at their sister resorts as well as get $200 room credit for the inconvenience. Well, it wasn’t just the pool that was under construction, their entire 2 out of the 4 buildings were under construction as well as their main lobby/registration area, which looked way better than the temporary one(Yes, I peeked).  So, half the place looked like a construction site. They, at least, blocked it off with some pretty green leaf covers to make it not so noticeable.

So after discovering all this, I’ll be honest, I was disappointed and bummed out. I did feel like a snobby ‘didn’t get what she wanted’ brat feeling this way. But, in my defense, we did pay a lot of money for this trip, so this girl had some expectations, okay?!

A lot of things were going through my head…

“Should we move to another room? But what if that room will be worse?”

“Should we move to another resort? If so, which one? But then we might get a crappy room anyway because it’s so last minute”

“There’s like nobody here, and a lot of male workers, am I comfortable being the only girl walking around in a bikini?”

“What if they break into our room at night because we’re the only foreigners here and nobody will know?” (ok, I got a little over dramatic there, I read too many stories, haha, but that did cross my mind because we didn’t see any other visitors for a while)

We took a long walk on the beach. I did some self talk(in my head) about how “You’re in freakin’ paradise and you’re complaining?! There are millions that would trade places with you in a heartbeat!” My DH is not the type to complain to management about anything, but seeing how disappointed I was, and being bummed out about the construction and the garden view “beachfront” situation himself, he did offer to ask to be moved to maybe a higher room, so we could at least see the ocean. But I was telling myself to get over it and just be happy where I was, that we probably won’t even be spending much time in the room anyways during daylight. So we decided to just stay where we were. (Later, we did regret not moving. It would’ve been awesome to have a view of that beautiful blue water!)

Later, we found out that Alexandra used to be condos prior to being bought out and made into a resort. So that explained the room being apartment style.(*Fun fact: There are people that live there that have already owned a place and didn’t want to move out when it was bought. They have to pay for the food at the restaurant.)

And the reason it was undergoing construction was because they were hit pretty bad by Hurricane Irma in 2017, so they had a lot of fixing to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  As days went by, we actually didn’t mind that there wasn’t a lot of people. The beach was quiet. Short wait time for dinner. I mean, karaoke night would probably be more entertaining if there was more than 10 people there, but it was all good. I was, actually, one of the volunteers who sang. And I DON’T SING!!! Well, I was talked into it by our waitress, and I only agreed to do it if she sang with me. And she did! It was great.

Enough of the story, here’s the actual review…

I mentioned this place having sister resorts. What does that mean? It’s kind of like a TJX card that you can use at Marshalls, Home Goods, and TJMaxx because they’re sister stores. Similar thing here, Alexandra Resort has 2 sister resorts, Blue Haven and Beach House, and any guests staying at either one of the 3 resorts have access to all of them, to use the beach, pool, and restaurant, ALL INCLUDED.

Having the option to go to the sister resorts made the trip so much more enjoyable. The variety made things exciting. We went to one resort for the afternoon, came back, changed, went to another one for the evening. The next day, we flipped it around, and so on.

 

Here’s a little recap of all the different resorts and some pictures to go with it:

Blue haven 

~Not on the ocean, more like a bay/area of water between islands where boats drive through

~Has small area closed off for swimming

~Building has a very luxurious resort feel

~Beach is small but infinity pool is gorgeous, and has a swim up bar. Lunch in the pool? Yes, please!

~Very pretty lounge area/pier-type thing that goes out into the water with glass railing

 

Beach house 

~Adults only

~Gorgeous, white, very romantic architecture

~Amazing restaurant. The best food out of all the resorts

~Beach is great, guests get their own reserved beach chairs in the front row closest to the ocean

~Mini catamaran, kayaking, stand up paddle board available to borrow at no charge

~Pool is nothing special

 

Alexandra Resort

~Not super fancy but still very nice and pretty

~Cheapest of the 3

~Beautiful pool with swim up bar (when its not under construction)

~Mini catamaran, kayaking, stand up paddle board available to borrow at no charge

~Awesome beach

 

All 3 resorts are all inclusive. There’s a shuttle bus that drives around and picks up/drops off every 1-2 hours.

So for the whole package, we got 3 restaurants, 3 different beaches, 3 pools. Sounds like an awesome deal to me!

We did have one planned activity on this trip and we highly recommend it. It was a Twilight Sunset Catamaran Tour with Beaches Resort. Beaches Resort is a family of Sandals so it’s a top notch fancy place. And its HUGE! Alexandra resort is their next door neighbor and (I’ll insert a pic from the plane and you can see) its about 5/6 times as big as Alexandra.

It was one of the resorts we were considering staying at while planning the trip, so I was curious to see what it was like. We got a chance to see a little bit of the resort, and I snapped a few pics, while walking to the meet up place for the tour. That place is like a city of its own! You would need a map to not get lost.  They have about 27 restaurants, 8 pools, multiple shops, and lots of activities going on. And it is packed with people, lots of families with kids. That place is GORGEOUS with so much to see but also so busy!

 

Overall, our trip was AMAZING!!! The beaches were perfect, with soft, white sand. The water was just surreal, such a beautiful turquoise color. I was honestly amazed by it til the day we left. The food was delicious, every meal, at every restaurant. All the staff was extremely friendly and fun. If we were to go again, after some thought and discussing the pros and cons, we would most likely stay at Alexandra again. Funny, huh? Considering my first impression.

Comment below, have you been to Turks and Caicos? If yes, what resort have you stayed at and how’d you like it?

Also, I’m curious to see how many of you haven’t even heard of this place, so let me know in the comments. I’ve met quite a few people that said, “Huh? Where’s that?”