This guest post is from a Travel Reward University student about her stay at the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar in Nassau, Bahamas, on points as a Hyatt Globalist member.

Review of Grand Hyatt Baha Mar

Grand Hyatt Baha Mar was opened in 2015 and the Baha Bar Water Park connected to it was opened in July 2021. The Baha Mar property consists of Grand Hyatt Baha Mar (great for families), the Rosewood (the quieter property described to us by our driver as the hotel for honeymooners) and the SLS hotel (described as the party scene hotel).

Grand Hyatt Baha Mar is located in Nassau, the Bahamas, less than 15 minutes from the Lynden Pindling International Airport (NAS).

Location and Booking

At the time we visited, it was a Category 6 hotel with rates for this property ranging from 21,000 points per night off-peak to 25,000 for standard nights and 29,000 for peak season. (Note - on March 25, 2025, it will be a Category 7 hotel ranging from 25,000 to 35,000 points per night.) I transferred Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt and booked this stay directly through the Hyatt website.

The Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card or Chase Sapphire Reserve® are card options that earn transferable points for Hyatt, or you can also utilize sign up bonuses on the Chase Ink business credit cards to earn points for a stay here.

To get the Nassau, we booked our flights with American Airlines points. I earn the majority of my American Airlines points by using the American Airlines eShopping portal. We flew out on the Saturday morning of Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and had an early flight from RDU with a layover in CLT, before heading on to Nassau. During our layover in CLT, we checked out The Club lounge as we had free access thanks to the Priority Pass Lounge access that comes with our Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card.

Once we landed in Nassau, we completed customs forms (keep a pen in your carry-on bag on the plane to do this quickly!) and went through customs before heading to the hotel. You can pre-book transportation through the hotel, but we opted to use a transportation service, Sandra’s Transportation, that had been recommended by my family. You have the option to stop at a liquor store and/or grocery store before going to the property as part of your ride from the airport. We pack lots of snacks and drinks with us in a free checked bag, but I highly recommend grabbing food before you get to the resort!

Amenities

This resort had so much to offer which we could not fit in during our 3 night stay. I’ll start with the activities that are included in your stay. When you book a Hyatt hotel stay using points, you do not have to pay the separate resort fees. At the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar, the $74 resort fee (again, this is WAIVED when you book your hotel stay with Hyatt points) gets you:

Daily access to Baha Bay Luxury Beachfront Waterpark for all registered guests
Single & Double Kayaks
Stand Up Paddle Boards
Water hammocks
Water mats
ESPA fitness center access
Unlimited local calls
2 branded refillable bottles
Sunscreen at all Hyatt towel huts
Hyatt beach and pool setup and seating with umbrellas
Daily Flamingo Ambasador Parade
Aviary Sanctuary hands on experience
Basketball, Bocce Ball, Croquet courts

The big hit for us was the waterpark! It was open from 10AM-5PM daily and our girls had a blast. The waterpark has over 20 slides, including thrilling drop slides, dueling racing slides, and plenty of slides and fun for toddlers and younger children. There is a fun “lazy”/action river, a Flow Curl Surf Simulator, several places to buy food and even a private club where you enjoy a quieter day with an infinity pool overlooking the ocean (for an extra cost, of course). The great thing about the Baha Bay waterpark, is that unlimited access is given to guests staying at the Baha Mar Resorts and this was completely free, even though we booked our hotel on points. We spent the majority of each day at this waterpark as it was open from 10AM - 5PM.

Unfortunately, many of the other activities required a large extra cost. The kid’s club came with a price tag of at least $70 for a 3 hour stay and required advance reservations. Pickleball for an hour will cost $35, plus another $12 per paddle you need to rent. Miniature golf starts at $25 + VAT per person. Since we were just there for 3 nights though, we found plenty of activities to enjoy without needing to spend extra money!

There were water hammocks you could snag in the ocean to relax on, for free. The daily flamingo parade at 9:30AM each morning gave you close up access to the flamingos, without having to pay $95 for a private flamingo encounter, or $100 for flamingo yoga. You could look over the short fence to see the tortoises for free, or pay $35 per person for a 20 minute encounter where you could touch and feed them. You can play around in the cave and see all of the animals in the aquariums for free, or you can pay $35 per person for an aquarium encounter at the touch pool. Again, all of these could be really fun options if you are staying at Grand Hyatt Baha Mar for a longer time but for us, we were content enjoying the free variations of those experiences.

Rooms

When we booked our stay, I had booked a standard 2 queen bedroom. It seems like most (if not all) of the rooms in this resort are either ocean-view or fountain-view. As I had Hyatt Globalist status for this trip, I was hopeful that we would get a fun upgraded view complimentary at check-in, but two weeks before our trip, we received a Globalist welcome email that mentioned “Complimentary room upgrades are limited at this moment. At this current moment, we do not have any available but if anything changes up to our Standard Suite availability at the time of your check-in, we will action accordingly.”

I was pleasantly surprised when we checked in and they automatically informed us that we had been upgraded to an ocean-view balcony room! We were on the 14th floor of the West Tower and the room had a beautiful ocean view. We were above the ESPA and the gym. The room was spacious enough for the four of us. The bathtub was a bit awkward - it had a really big step into the tub, a stationary half glass door and a very thin tub. If we had toddlers that we were planning to bathe in this tub, it would have been quite difficult, but we were okay since our girls are older.

There was no mini-fridge in our room, though I’ve seen you can call the front desk to request one. Many people have been charged $50 for this, but I have heard Globalists can potentially get this fee waived. Each room came with aluminum water bottles that you could use throughout your stay. There were water refilling stations on every floor, as well as water refilling stations at every towel hut and throughout the property.

Housekeeping was always completed during the day while we were at the waterpark. They did come to our room the first night to over turndown service, but we were getting ready and said we were ok without it! I’m not sure if that’s the reason why they never offered it again, but that’s ok as we didn’t need it!

We enjoyed spending time on the balcony watching all of the cruise ships heading into the port of Nassau each morning, as well as watching them leave after 5pm each evening.

Dining

There are many restaurants on property ranging from food trucks and pool bars to restaurants by celebrity chefs like Marcus Samuelsson's Marcus at Baha Mar Fish + Chop House, Carna steakhouse by Dario Cecchini, and the kid-friendly and popular Sugar Factory.

Reservations are highly recommended at each restaurant, especially during busy weeks. Keep in mind that many of the restaurants did have a $50 per person cancellation fee if you cancel within 24 hours of your reservation.

Breakfast

As a Hyatt Globalist, we were able to enjoy complimentary breakfast at the Regatta Buffet for 2 adults and 2 children, Café Madeline, Knosh or Palm’s Café, up to $145, including VAT.

We chose to try the Regatta Buffet the first day, and arrived shortly after 8AM. This time ended up being the best time to arrive as there was little to no wait. Anything after 8:30AM seemed to require a bit of a wait to be seated. The breakfast buffet would have cost $44 per adult and $18 per child, plus VAT. Our total came out to $155 total but this was automatically wiped and never appeared as a charge on our room charges throughout the stay.

Our first attempt at the Regatta Buffet was a little disappointing. While the food is a buffet containing standard American breakfast foods, they also have rotating areas with traditional Mexican and Asian foods as well. There is a self-serve juice station with fresh juices like beet, carrot, watermelon, berry and more. Servers are coming around regularly to help with anything else and our first day, it took asking three times to get a cup of coffee. Our server never came by again until we were standing up to leave. The part of breakfast that our girls loved the most were all the fresh fruit popsicles that they had!

The second day, we attempted to go to Cafe Madeline, but there was such a long wait that we went to the Regatta Buffett again. Our service this day was PHENOMENAL and some of the best service I’ve ever received at a buffet restaurant. One of our girls was looking for berry juice as she had loved it the day before, but the staff member at the juice bar informed us they didn’t have any today. About 15 minutes later, he came and found our table to let us know they had a fresh watermelon juice if we wanted to try that instead. Our waters and coffees were refilled regularly, extra apple juice was proactively poured for our other daughter when she was up getting more food, and plates were cleared quickly from our table. The third day found us at the Regatta Buffet again, back to similar service from the first day. All this to say, the food was fine, I would never pay $155 for it though, and staff was hit or miss.

Lunches, Dinners, and Tips for Savings on Food

As for the other restaurants, we grabbed burgers at the Umami Burger Bar in the Baha Bay Waterpark one evening around 4:50pm (right before it closed at 5pm). We ordered two burgers and added an extra patty on each, a basket of chicken tenders, an order of fries and an order of truffle fries. This came out to $108 and we had it charged to our room. The burgers were delicious and we shared all of the food between the 4 of us.

The final night, we made reservations for the Sugar Factory. Known for it’s fun food and crazy drinks, we were likely one of the cheapest families eating there and got away with a $145 bill. We ordered the burger sliders, a burger with fries, a steak salad (honestly one of the cheapest meals on property), as well as a wild milkshake for dessert. Service was great at this restaurant and we really enjoyed our experience here.

One other fun perk as a Hyatt Globalist was receiving vouchers at check-in for beverages on property. We received one voucher per night we were staying and each voucher covered two drinks, up to $25 each including VAT, at the pool bars, the T2 Cigar Bar, or the Regatta Buffet. Our girls enjoyed getting virgin strawberry daiquiris each day with these vouchers.

*Tip: When planning to come to this resort, we planned to check a bag since I had free bags with my American Airlines status. We brought several protein heavy snacks with us as well as pre-mixed cocktails to save lots of money on this trip. We had the protein filled food as supplements for lunches and mid-day snacks.

Other ways we planned to save on food: 1) If you walk just off property from the Baha Bay Waterpark, you will find the Daquiri Shack. They have delicious virgin and alcoholic beverages, as well as cheaper food options like 8 wings for $10. Unfortunately the day we went, the chef had taken the day off so we weren’t able to try the food.

2) Download the Kraven app, which is like DoorDash. Since we weren’t able to get food from the Daquiri Shack that day, we went with Plan B which was ordering from The New Duff on the Kraven app. For $70, we were able to get a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich for the girls, two types of stuffed buns, and two duff desserts.

3) We also ordered Marco’s Pizza for delivery one night. $41 got us a large pizza and chicken casear salad to share, although the delivery had issues and said it was delivered an hour before it eventually came. We called 3x, the driver somehow got lost, but we eventually got our food and ate on a balcony outside while watching the nightly free fountain show!

4) Many families will order the pizza at Pizza Lab and share that for a meal. It is quite large and most kids will be thrilled to get pizza for every dinner on vacation :)

Service

As I mentioned above, the service seemed to be hit or miss at the Regatta Buffet, but was fantastic at the Sugar Factory. Unfortunately we didn’t experience the best service when it came to the front desk staff, and this was the big issue that really bothered us about our stay. On our second day, I pulled up our room charges and found a weird $33.86 charge at a bar that we did not make, as well as over $300 in accommodation fees which we did not have to pay as we booked with points. We went to the front desk to ask that it be removed, and they said they would file a dispute and have it removed. The charges were removed as soon as we walked away.

The next day, our final full day, I received this text from the Grand Hyatt Front Office:

I took a look at the room charges on my phone and noticed another charge that we had not purchased. They apologized and said the billing department would look into it.

Later that afternoon, I noticed a THIRD charge to our room - this time a $338 bill from the SPA. We went to the front desk again to politely ask what was going on and how this kept happening. They think it is because the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar has two towers (East and West) and they use the same room numbers in both. This felt shady to us though, as each time we billed something to our room, they asked for both our room number, the Tower, as well as our name to confirm the room. The front desk representative even said, “Yeah, if you don’t check your charges each day, they might be wrong”.

We were really disappointed in how this was handled, and can’t imagine how many people have fraudulent charges on their account that they just pay because they aren’t taking a look at it as closely as we did. People can pay over $10,000 for a week at this hotel (EXCLUDING the room) if they eat every meal on property and pay for some of the extra experiences that Grand Hyatt Baha Mar has to offer.

One other service aspect that we experienced - I knew that late check-out requests were not always guaranteed as this was a resort property! Our flight home on Tuesday evening didn’t leave Nassau until 6:46 PM, so we were hoping to maximize our time at the waterpark and get a late check-out so we could shower and pack before heading to the airport. I had asked the front desk in a text our last full day there about late checkout and they told me to check with the operator on the morning of departure. When I had to go to the front desk to ask about more fraudulent charges that night, I figured I would ask them then in person about late checkout. They told me our room was already booked for someone else, but they would try to move it around so we could have late checkout. We thought this was great! We checked back before going to bed and they said they couldn’t do that, but they could give us 2PM checkout, which we were pretty happy with as the standard checkout time was 11AM.

They informed us of an arrivals and departures lounge which was down the hall from the West Tower check-in desk. We took a look and saw it had a coffee machine, storage lockers with keypads on them to keep your things, as well as a few shower rooms (that unfortunately looked pretty moldy and not well taken care of). We decided to check our bags into this area at 2PM, as we could then spend a few more hours around the property without our bags before leaving. One of the lockers worked great, but the other one got stuck… with our bags in it. We went to the front desk and waited to ask someone about this and they sent us to the concierge desk who then had to send someone to open it for us. At this point, we were worried we would have to go through this again at 4PM when our transportation arrived to take us to the airport, so we just took all of our luggage out of the storage lockers and just sat in the lobby until we had to leave. The Arrivals and Departures Lounge was great in concept, but it seemed like it wasn’t well taken care of for people to utilize it to the fullest extent.

Overall Thoughts

The Grand Hyatt Baha Mar is a beautiful property with turquoise ocean water, an incredibly fun waterpark, plenty of food options and really great Hyatt Globalist perks. While we had a wonderful time and are glad we went for the long weekend with our girls, the hit-or-miss service, the incredibly expensive resort prices on all the activities that are not included, and the fraudulent charges really make us question whether we will be back or not. If you go into it knowing that you’ll need to pay a decent amount for any food though and don’t mind keeping an eagle eye on your room charges, you will likely have an amazing time!

One nice thing about flying back to the United States from Nassau, is that you clear customs in the Bahamas and not in a city like Miami that can take forever. We also had TSA Pre-check printed on our boarding passes and while there was not a separate line for TSA screenings, we did not have to take our shoes off which was a win! As for customs, we downloaded the Mobile Passport Control app to expedite the process since we do not have Global Entry, but there was no line when we were there and we made it through quickly. We were also able to access a (very small) Priority Pass lounge called The Lingum Club Lounge. It was nice to have a few drinks and small selection of food to enjoy and not have to pay for before our flight back to the US. We had access to this lounge thanks to us each having a Capital One Venture X credit card.

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Grand Hyatt Baha Mar Review