Let me start by saying I've owned a 2-bedroom unit in Tower II of this complex since 1998 so there isn't much we don't know about Long Beach Resort. We had a lot of family in town and decided this unit was a good mix of price and sleeping arrangements to accommodate our overflow crowd.
The condo unit we booked was clean and appeared as advertised, however, on day 3 of our stay the power was shut off to our unit because the utility bill was not paid. When we called Southern Vacay guest relations (off shore call center) the number was busy and we had to call back repeatedly. When we finally got to an agent we were told storms in the area caused the outage but we had already contacted the utility company and they confirmed the bill was delinquent.
To remedy the situation Southern Vacations moved us to another unit in a different tower and here is where the problems started. My family had to pack their belongings, in wet bathing suits no less, and move an entire building over to another unit. When we got there the door code was incorrect which prompted another call to the SV call center... and another round of busy signals. We finally got the code changed and opened the door to a unit that looked like it had the original decorations from the 90's, very dirty vents, and overall much worse than the original unit. This unit had one queen bed + sofa bed vs. two beds in our other unit. The sofa was so bad it required us to purchase an air mattress.
Because we were moved so quickly I guess Southern Vacations failed to update our booking with the new unit number and that lead to the next set of problems. We came back up from the beach and the door code had 'rolled' to a new code as the unit was supposed to be unoccupied. Another call to the SV call center, another round of busy signals and finally an updated door code. THIS HAPPENEND TWO MORE TIMES!! Clearly Southern Vacations needs to train their call center to update booking reservations when something like this happens, it made for a terrible experience.
Full disclosure, as owners in this complex we know the perils of renting our unit both with a management company and on our own. Our current managers are local and take a lot of pride in managing the expectations of both the owner and, more importantly, the guests renting our unit. I can tell SV has grown too big to care about something like this so I don't expect much. We received an 8% refund on our stay...oh well!!
