Hilton Seychelles Labriz Resort and Spa

We are a family of 4 (children aged 12 and 11) who stayed here for 4 nights in April 18, after spending 6 on Eden Island/ exploring Mahe. We stayed in a King Beachfront Villa. This is a beautifully built and designed hotel with exceptionally efficient, welcoming and friendly staff. Nothing was ever too much trouble. Udhaya the restaurant manager and Charles deserve a special mention and our thanks for always working so energetically to make sure every meal experience we had was excellent. Virtek also who is part of the house keeping team. He looked after us and the Villa brilliantly, and he was exceptionally lovely to our children. The animal towel sculptures he leaves on the beds are legendary! The beach is stunning, the sea (like everywhere else we went in the Seychelles) is very warm, clear and good for snorkelling, and the tropical forest that lies behind the hotel adds to the fantastic scenery. There is a good selection of different restaurants which are part of the half board so you feel like you are going out for the evening to different places. As a family we loved the ability to use the hotel's bikes everyday to potter round the hotel complex. Members of our family used the on site diving centre for a boat trip for excellent snorkelling, and had brief treatments at the spa. The quality of all the fixtures and fittings of the villa were of a very high standard and always super clean, Simple things like the sun loungers in the garden (linking to the beach) were well padded and much more comfortable than you get in many hotels. I would be happy to holiday here as a couple, or as family. The spread out nature of the villas meant the beach was almost always hardly occupied and there was always plenty of space to be apart from children if you wanted to be. Equally as a family, we and our children thoroughly enjoyed it. Our children were constantly in the pools or sea and enjoyed in particular Cafe Dauban.

Silhouette Island is one of the few islands in the Seychelles where there is only one major resort, in this case the Hilton (there is another small hotel near the dock, but it is privately owned). There is little to criticise as far as the accommodation goes: all the rooms are villas, either with or without pool. My wife and I stayed in a standard garden villa. The bedroom/living room is huge, and there is a small closet area next to a vast bathroom with a shower, free standing bathtub, toilet and even a garden shower. The bed is also enormous. The villas are arranged in a long line, in the middle of which are the main resort facilities: reception, restaurants, pool, bars, etc. The only comment I have about this arrangement is that it is possible to end up in a villa quite far from the resort centre. The beachside pool villas, for example, are located beyond all the others at the far end of the resort, although each of these is provided with a pair of bicycles to make things easier for guests. The hillside pool villas, while not having a view of the sea, are more convenient in this respect, as they are close to the resort centre. Our main criticisms of this resort centre on two things: communications and the food. First, communications: our wedding anniversary fell during our stay, and my wife had booked, online, a massage session which was on special offer. The confirmation email gave few details of what she had booked, so on arrival we asked the concierge to confirm our booking, which she did, telling us we were both booked for a massage at 2:30 on our anniversary. So far, so good. At the same time, she told us that our allocated villa not being ready for us, we were to be give another, slightly closer to the centre, which we could move into at once. To cut a long story short, we arrived at the spa at the appointed time only to discover that not only did they not have our booking, but that the rest of the day was fully booked! We were not best pleased, as it was in fact our last full day in the resort, and we were leaving too early the following day to accept an alternative appointment. We later found out that our massage had been booked under the original villa number we'd been given, and when this was changed, no one had bothered to transfer our booking to the new villa. The spa had called the original villa to confirm, receiving no reply, since we were not there, had cancelled the booking. Still on the topic of communication, there is a Creole restaurant in the village called Grann Kaz which, we found out only in the afternoon, from the guest information sheet, was closed on Fridays and Saturdays, and only open for dinner the other days. As we were only there from Thursday to Sunday, we tried to book for the Thursday evening, and found it already fully booked. Had someone warned us, we could have booked it much earlier in the day, and might have had a chance to get a table. (In any event, it struck us as odd for a restaurant to close on Fridays and Saturdays to begin with.) Finally, I also went to the branch of the local PADI dive school in the resort centre, where I booked a snorkelling trip for the next day. On arrival at the appointed time at the main school, I found they had no record of my having booked, as the resort shop had not let them know I was coming. I also found out that another, and potentially much better trip to North Island, where the marine life is more abundant, was planned for the day after my trip. Had anyone bothered to tell me about that originally, I would have booked it instead of the trip I did take. Food in all Seychelles resorts is very expensive by European or American standards, which is not surprising, considering an awful lot of it has to be shipped in from outside. We ate at the resort's 'in house" restaurant, Cafe Dauban, the Italian restaurant, Portobello, and the Japanese restaurant, Sakura. All of them eye-wateringly expensive, even by Seychelles standards (we ate as well, indeed better, for less money at the highly rated Kempinski's L'Indochine on Mahe). While the food at Portobello and Sakura was good in both cases, we felt the resort's own restaurant left a lot to be desired at the price: it was disappointingly average, we thought, and not what we would have expected in a resort of this quality. We went for one of its "Street Food Festival" dinners, and ate fairly mediocre fare with a glass of wine each for $200, the most expensive and least appetising meal of our stay. Our advice to anyone staying at this resort would be to consider a half- or full-board plan, which would probably work out a lot cheaper, even if you do still have to pay heavily for drinks. On the plus side, the pool bar runs two happy hours a day 5.30-6.30 pm and 9.00- 11 pm every day, and simply offer a selection of drinks for half price, so you don't feel obligated to buy two of everything, but still benefit from the happy hour deal. I don't want to say we didn't enjoy our stay, and there are many things to like about this resort, but I think we would have enjoyed it much more had someone in management thought about the short length of our stay and made appropriate suggestions early on. In general, the way the resort's eating and activity schedules are organised, I would recommend it only if you're going to stay for a week, unless you really don't want to do anything other that sit by the pool or beach and read, as quite a few things only happen once during the week.