‘The food kinda sucked too’: Sandals Resorts customers robbed on honeymoon, told they should have used safe in room

A Sandals Resorts customer says she and her husband were robbed on their honeymoon in St. Lucia. When they reported the infraction, she says they were told they should have used the room’s safe to secure their valuables.

TikTok user Alyssa Argento (@alyssa.argento) posted the three-part series on her honeymoon nightmare Tuesday. “Let’s do a storytime on how me and my husband got robbed on our honeymoon,” she says to start the video.

She explains that she and her husband arrived at the Sandals Regency La Toc in St. Lucia a week and a half prior. After dropping their luggage in the room, the two decided to visit the resort’s pool bar, which they learned would close early. In their rush, they neglected to lock up their valuables, including cash, Alyssa recalls.

Alyssa’s husband, she says, realized this when he returned to the room later to secure some cash for their evening out. She says he searched the pocket of his backpack where he stored his cash and found $455 missing. “It was gone,” Alyssa says. “He immediately starts freaking out.” The couple notes that there was a bottle of champagne in the room that hadn’t been there when they left for the pool.

A manager came down to the couple’s room to hear their concern. “After this, we explained everything to her. She continues to say, ‘Oh, you know there’s a safe in the room?’” she says. “We always put our stuff in the safe, but we had just gotten there. We wanted to get down to the pool. We didn’t expect someone to come in and go through our stuff.”

Alyssa says the manager did send security to investigate and said they would check the security cameras and confirm who came in and out of the room at the time the theft occurred. Alyssa says she thought the manager was going to handle the situation, so she and her husband decided to go to the resort’s restaurant for dinner. “Also, sidebar, the food kind of really sucked, just saying,” she says.

In a follow-up video, Alyssa says the next day she received a call from the front desk letting her know that the police wanted to come and make a report. “We tell them everything. We told security and everything. We told the manager, and they make their report, and they leave,” she says. 

A few days pass, and Alyssa says she and her husband were having a good time on their honeymoon despite having their cash stolen. Over the course of that time, she says she received multiple offers of credit toward another stay or spa services, but she rejected the offers and requested the $455 back. “No, I want my money back,” Alyssa says. “At this point, it wasn’t about the money. It was about being violated and somebody stealing from us. It was literally the principle of it.”

Ultimately, Alyssa says Sandals did handle the situation. Near the end of their trip, Alyssa says she and her husband spoke to the head of security, who revealed that the team had looked into who had accessed their room and determined that the staff member who delivered their champagne bottle was the likely culprit. Even though they couldn’t definitively prove he was the culprit, the resort ended his employment there. “We sit down with [the head of security] and he makes us sign a receipt of receiving the money, which was $455, and he hands us the money in cash,” she says.

In a third video, Alyssa reveals that she reported the incident via email to Sandals corporate when she and her husband arrived home. But she was not satisfied with the response she received.

In an email, a Sandals operations manager wrote (Alyssa shared a screenshot of the email), “It is regrettable that the in room safe was not used to secure the valuable belongings. Suffice to say the use of the same provides the guest with reasonable due diligence in the securing of personal belongings and thus the onus, responsibility and any liability rests with the resort when the in room safe is used. As this was not the preferred method of securing your valuables, in consequence, it is not possible, based on The Hotel Keepers Liability Law, Chapter 151, to provide any monetary compensation for the loss, save for the amount of U.S. $50.00. However, as a gesture of goodwill you were refunded the sum of USD455.00.”

Alyssa wrote in response, “Yes the money was refunded to us like I addressed in the email below, but not until the very last minute of our stay. Which ruined our entire trip. Someone was fired for this incident so they obviously thought someone did something. … Do better and maybe consider a stronger background check on your new hires. It’s good to know that you just barely skirt the letter of the law.”

Alyssa says she has not heard anything else from Sandals. “But yeah, I guess, at the end of the day, if your stuff is not in a safe, that gives anyone coming in and out of your room the authority to take it from you.”

Theft by hotel staff is not common

According to Forbes, hotel staff rarely steal from the rooms they service because in the age of electronic locks, it is incredibly easy to detect who went in and out of a room and precisely when. “I say, when there is a problem that goes on for any length of time, management is responsible. (In both places where I’ve seen it happen, management was – through bad hiring practices and negligent supervision – just plain asking for it.) Legally, the hotel’s liability is limited (unless it can be proven conclusively that an employee theft occurred), but still, if the manager had stepped on it nice and hard the first time it showed up as a problem, it would likely have gone no further,” the article reads. 

The Daily Dot reached out to Alyssa via TikTok comment and Sandals via press email for comment.

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