My wife and I just got back from Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, where we stayed at the Sea Lark Villa on Long Bay Beach with our three kids. We have visited Turks and Caicos many times and have stayed in or seen many villas. Our experience at Sea Lark Villa was an aweful one and I urge you to stay away from this house.There were three major issues with the house. The first was the house itself. The second was the service we received while renting the house. And the third was the cost of air conditioning and for supplies. I discuss all three below.
The pictures on the Sea Lark rental site are beautiful. The ocean in Turks and Caicos are amazing. The pool at the house is very nice. But don’t be fooled by the pictures and description on the promotional site as the house itself is subpar and should not be rented as a luxury villa.
The layout of the Sea Lark house is screwy, to say the least. The top floor has three bedrooms. The bottom floor, a completely separate apartment only accessible from the side of the house and not from the top floor, has two bedrooms. The three bedrooms on the main floor are extremely small. We live in New York City and these rooms would be small even for a New York City apartment let alone a high-end ocean-front vacation home.
In addition to being small, the rooms are dark and only one has an ocean view. As for a master suite, keep looking! The house does not have a master suite. All of the bathrooms have showers (there isn’t a bath in the house!) and are barely larger than a powder room. My wife and I stayed in the ocean front house and we couldn’t even be in the bathroom at the same time in our room.
The main room on the top main floor is small and cramped. The kitchen takes up a large portion of the room leaving very little space to hang out. And if you’re traveling with kids or a group of couples or adults, you will not have ample space to relax and hang out, which is the entire point of visiting the islands.
All the furniture is old and out of date. We normally don’t care about furniture in rental homes. But the Sea Lark furniture was so old, stained and moldy that it was noticeable to everyone in our party.
The downstairs apartment has even smaller rooms than upstairs (bedrooms, bathrooms and the common area/kitchen room). There is also no natural light downstairs as the windows are tiny with no view whatsoever (unless you call gravel driveway or thick bushes a view!). I had to apologize to our guests for their sleeping quarters. A suite or two at the Comfort Inn would have been a better set up. (I apologize to the Comfort Inn for the insult if you happen to see the house).
In addition to its small, dark rooms, Sea Lark is an extremely dirty house. When my wife and I walked it, we were both surprised at the stench of the house. The upstairs had a bad used-car with an air freshener smell. And the downstairs apartment reaked of mold most of the trip (even after we aired it out). One of our guests broke out in hives either from mold or the cleaning supplies used.
In addition to the usual dirt and sand you will find in Caribbean villas, we found animal feces
throughout the house (most likely from the gekkos on the island). We also found a small gekko and several large insects, including a scorpion that we were lucky to find before it bit one of our kids or us. And the icing on the cake was the discovery of a used condom in one of the downstairs bedrooms. When we told the manager, Patrick, we found a nasty used condom, Patrick blamed us for putting it there. Given my two brothers were staying in the room where the condom was found, I’m 100% sure it wasn’t ours!(If you do rent this house, do not use the provided housekeeping services.
After the first day, we fired the cleaning lady recommended by the owner of the house. She was using Fabreeze to clean everyting. While amusing, we didn’t want our 15 month old crawling in Fabreeze.)The outside of the house is nice, as the pictures show. The pool is lovely. And the ocean is, well, the ocean. You can’t go wrong in the ocean in the Turks. The only downside of the outside of the house was the beach. If you want a sandy beach to lay out on or let the kids play on, this is not the place for you. There is not much of a beach by the ocean in front of the house. It’s mainly rocks and corral. We had to walk about half a mile down Long Bay Beach to find nice sand.
While the house was not up to our expectations (or any expectations of travelers who can spend the money on a private villa in the Caribbean!), the service we received was even worse. This is important because you are in an extremely remote and desolate part of the island. The roads aren’t paved. And one night we lost electricity and could not reach Patrick or anyone at the power company.
We arrived on a Saturday. The air conditioning in the bedrooms did not work. We called Patrick, the manager, no less than 8 times on Saturday and Sunday and didn’t hear back from Patrick until late Monday to fix one of the ACs in an upstairs bedroom. When we contacted the owner and Patrick about the state of the house, we were provided short answers and ignored for the most part. Patrick insisted that the house was clean. (It was not). And he insisted that the used condom was ours (it was not). As it turns out from discussions with other local realtors and from our observations, it looks like the manager or someone else lives in the house when it is not rented out and does not take good care of it. There was a very old run down car in the driveway for the first week (which was then moved into the garage).
It took us 2 days to get Patrick to the house to fix a broken toilet. After fixing it, the owner said we used too much toilet paper. Not exactly what you expect from a compassionate owner who you’re paying a lot of money to rent a house!
When it came time to leave on Saturday, Patrick said he would get a van to take my family and the luggage to the airport. We were taking the 8:10 AM flight to Miami. I asked Patrick to show up at 6 AM. He showed up at 6:40 AM with two local men who were driving a beat-up pick up truck. The truck barely fit the luggage and could not accommodate our group so we were forced to shuttle back and forth between the airport and the Hertz facility, where we had to drop off a car. We made it to our plane at 8 AM, 10 minutes before departure. The stress caused by Patrick’s tardiness was unacceptable.
The last issue we had with Sea Lark was the cost. We were OK with spending the money to rent the house. But the owner charged an obscene amount ($600/week) for air conditioning and electricity. She also does not stock the house with anything, which is unheard of for high-end vacation rentals. Yes, that’s right. Not even a roll of toilet paper! So expect to pay at least $750/week extra on supplies and electricity/AC.
The island is amazing. We love T&C. But rent this place at your own risk. The owner doesn’t care about the renters, as we learned. And if anything breaks, you’re on your own!
