Review: Four Seasons at Anahita, Mauritius

I’ve had this growing belief that Four Seasons has, to use the technical industry term, become a bit shit.  They announce property after property, more and more generic, less and less impressive, all in the name of market share.  I stopped seeing them as exceptional a long time ago, and take little notice of their new openings.  I do the equivalent of a sniff test on their press releases, where I wait for the aroma of faeces to hit my nostrils and then flee.  It rarely takes long.

Mauritius, though, hands them two enormous advantages.  They have precisely one competitor on the island.  And they’ve just spent months closed for a major refurb.  Which is to say: if they can’t get it right here, they can’t get it right anywhere.

Getting there

We arrived from One&Only, which was about a 40-minute drive away.  You come into a private estate, past a golf course, past the residences, and eventually reach the hotel.  It opens into a gorgeous, Zen-like lobby that’s a proper piece of design, giving onto a bar with a view across the barachois — the name for this sort of saltwater thing, which I just spent 10 minutes reading a press release about, just so I could impress you with my new vocabulary.

Can I be bothered to look-up the designer and his background?  No.  But it felt like a Maybourne hotel, and I mean that as a compliment.  It not feeling like a Four Seasons is, these days, a significant compliment.  That lobby is among the most striking I’ve ever seen.  Which was just as well, given the amount of time I’d spend in it, usually waiting on someone.

First impressions, then: so much better than the One&Only. To save you the long walk to get to the conclusion: that is the conclusion.

Setting

It is windier here than down the road at the One&Only. Not like cows flying around in a tornado bad, nor the sort of wind that ruins a holiday, but enough to get a shout-out in a review.  What you get in return is a lagoon sheltered behind a coral reef, which means flat, calm water and children who cannot be swept out to sea.  Two of the three beaches here are man-made, and you can tell.  The main stretch is grainy, the water uninviting, and it comes equipped with a warning system that informs you which animal might be killing you and your loved ones on any given day.  I appreciate the transparency.  I would appreciate a better beach more.  The good beach is the one you have to get on a boat to reach, over on Ile aux Cerfs.

The property is also vastly, ludicrously spread out — 64 acres of it.  Beautiful on a site plan, less beautiful at 8 am with two children and a 20-minute walk to the kids club.  Please don’t make the mistake I made.  Look at the map.  Look at it properly, like a man reading a contract rather than a man picking which horse to bet $5 on, and make sure you are staying somewhere near the facilities.  Otherwise you will spend your holiday on roads filled with buggies, none of which are quite wide enough for both you and the buggy without wincing every time one approaches.

Facilities

The main area is gorgeous.  We’ve established that, right?  But it goes beyond the lobby.  There’s yet another bar, multiple restaurants and seating areas all strung together and facing out onto the barachois.  This entire area is clearly, recently refurbished – and it pays off.  Then I get to be fancy and throw the word barachois in again, because they wrap around the entire pavilion, home to some lovely fish too.  It makes a very pleasant spot for an evening drink, assuming you can find a seat, which you can’t.

Then the beach area, which looks like it belongs to a different hotel that succumbed to the financial crisis in 2008.  Not just the beach, but everything around it.  It’s right on the verge of depressing you by its sheer existence.  Like Gary Busey.  There is free ice cream at the pool, though, so it is like deciding to go back in the water in the Jaws movie, 10 minutes after that kid died.  There’s also a quiet beach for those who have given up on the loud one.

The best thing here is the island you can access, 20 minutes away by boat.  Yep, the selling point is not being on property.  It’s a private, real beach, with a restaurant and a list of activities that includes things like paragliding and a speedboat trip to a waterfall.  Wonderful, you may think.  So we went to see the waterfall, which was a complete waste of time, were it not for the children spotting a dolphin, which would have been lovely had we not gone to Kisawa a few days later and rendered the memory worthless.

Spa and Gym

Twelve treatment suites out on wooden stilts over the mangroves, each with its own sauna, changing room and outdoor shower.  There’s a thermal suite with steam, sauna, cold plunge and experience showers.  There’s also a Royal Spa Suite with a handcrafted stone tub and private steam room, and an overwater hair salon offering something called Hair Botox.  We really have run out of ideas, haven’t we?  It is, apparently, the only overwater spa in Mauritius.  Congrats, I think?

I follow a “look, don’t touch” philosophy at most resort spas, especially the average ones.  Whilst average in all other departments, they’re exceptional at knowing how to charge, and rarely, if ever, get remotely close to justifying the experience.  But Lucie took one for the team, because here at Dorsia, we don’t just shit on people; we shit on people with proof.  “Mediocre and rushed” was the assessment there.

The gym, however, is fantastic.  A full-length swimming pool of its own, a separate HIIT area, an outdoor section, and a LifeFitness-equipped indoor space.  Someone understood the assignment.  It also has a reception area with a television in it, like a waiting room, which is a choice.

Accommodation

All the one-bedrooms are the same.  The only variable is where they’ve put you, which, given how spread out this place is, does count for something.  They connect, which makes them work for families.

They are, I have to say, pretty nice.  We came from a two-bedroom at the One&Only and this didn’t feel like a downgrade, which tells you something about both properties.  It’s a proper suite.  You could call it a villa if you wanted to work in marketing.  Separate living area, tall pitched ceiling, circular dining table, a separate room purely for luggage, a walk-through shower and an outdoor one.  Bright colours, everything clearly new apart from the floors.

Our Premier Ocean room was not as premier as I’d have liked, chosen as it was from poor information and before they’d updated the website with pictures that might have saved me from myself.  The beach in front would have been nicer with young children, who are always one bad decision away from falling into the water, and you can often hear the boats going past.

The outdoor space, though, is the highlight.  Two loungers facing the ocean, a round table for four that you can actually eat at, a large sun sofa, two umbrellas, and a thing that is halfway between a plunge pool and a pool.  You are not doing laps in it.  You are, however, warm enough in it, and so are the children.  It’s not private in the way a real villa is private — the boats are still there, distant but present — but the view out to the ocean is lovely, and for a small space it’s surprisingly good.  I spent time in it voluntarily, which is my highest architectural award.

Service

The service is certainly better than One&Only, but that’s like saying being punched in the eye is more pleasant than being kicked in the balls.  Mauritius service seems to put the slow in “fucking hell, this is slow”.

I don’t like the Four Seasons app, where you’re talking to faceless people who seem to have been programmed to respond “Certainly” or “We’ll come back to you”, and 15 hours after your message of “I’m stuck on this cliff edge, using my teeth to hold on whilst 100m up, is anyone coming” you get “Someone will be with you soon”, and you lose faith in it.  It’s like chatting with AI when you’ve run out of tokens.  Somehow, WhatsApp always seems to work better.  Yet via using the app, as it is still, somehow, the best way to communicate, we were given the wrong information multiple times.  The wrong days for restaurant openings, wrong directions for the seahorse activity, and neglecting to mention that children had to be eight to do it, which wasted our entire morning.

And whilst this seems to be a Mauritius issue, it’s freaking bizarre that you need to pay all third parties in cash.  We got a taxi there, which meant getting cash out, because the hotel can’t pay them directly.  We took an activity on the Four Seasons beach, and then I had to waste even more of my morning by waiting in the lobby to hand cash to a stranger.  That isn’t in any recent definition of luxury I’ve read.

Then the bikes.  We asked.  We asked again.  We asked a third time.  Over a day later, two of the four arrived, and one of those was wrong.  There was a chap at reception who clearly and sincerely wanted to fix it, and who told us on day two that the bikes had come, at which point we went to collect our imaginary bikes and returned empty-handed.  After that we felt like the arseholes for raising it again, so we simply accepted a bike-free holiday.  Perhaps that was the strategy.  Perhaps I don’t even like bikes.  Perhaps nothing exists.

Food

There’s a big range of places to eat here, and most of it is new, shiny and very appealing.  Even the Rum Library, to me, a non-drinker, made me want to go inside it.

Angara offers Indian food and was the only restaurant without a dedicated children’s menu.  Naturally, it’s the one we most wanted to try.  So we didn’t go.  Awase is Japanese; Radici for Italian; Chaloupe does international breakfast and Mediterranean lunch by the pool.  Ti Pwason is a barefoot seafood grill on the beach.  The Rum Library is exactly what it sounds like.  And La Plaz Beach Grill does seafood and cocktails over on Ile aux Cerfs.

Ever heard of that experiment where they randomly zap rats and see how much more stressed it makes them compared to regular intervals?  That’s the food here.  You never know what’s going to arrive, as sometimes it’s great, often it’s not.  I had some excellent dishes here.  A red snapper fillet; a starter of fish carpaccio; Awase was surprisingly great.  A coconut brioche at breakfast was special.  And yet, at Radici, someone was having a shitty day in the kitchen, and my search for the advertised beef continues to this day.  Just to add some sprinkles of shit on my joy, they then made us wait 30 minutes for dessert.  And then at Awase, the dessert managed to be a single bite.  A Buddha bowl from in-room dining that suggested Buddha was a notorious anorexic, as it showed up with less bowl and more the spiritual idea of one.

The breakfast buffet was also a disappointment.  The selection is limited, the pastries a waste of atoms, the fruit poor.  And yet it is somehow a clear improvement — calmer, less chaotic, with actual table service, than One&Only.  The à la carte menu attached to it has four options, which may be the smallest I have ever seen.  There’s a pancake station, which the children naturally loved.  We came for breakfast on the second day and the waiter remembered our entire drinks preferences from the previous day.

Kids Friendly

The kids club is large and thoroughly undesirable-looking, redeemed almost entirely by the shaded, swimmable pool at the centre of it.  There are multiple rooms of activities, including an arts and crafts room with an enormous television and a games console in it, which rather undermines the arts and the crafts.

The teens club is elsewhere and better: consoles, a DJ area, table tennis, a pool table, a large television, and a small room that can only be described as a mini office, presumably for the next generation of OnlyFans entrepreneurs.  It was deadly quiet in there.  There were children everywhere else on the resort.  I have no explanation.

The Good

• Decent rooms
• The private island
• Gym

The Bad

• The beach
• Some of the food
• Main pool
• Paying strangers cash in the lobby (please read the rest of the review before you think I’m hiring prostitutes)

The Luxurious

• Lobby area and surrounding upgrades
• Some of the food

Conclusion

Let me pitch something to Four Seasons: a free night at the One&Only Le Saint Geran before every stay.  Yep, every single customer gets to stay there, compliments of Four Seasons.  Imagine how happy your guests would be, arriving here straight from there.  It’d be Beatlemania, if the fans had escaped Pol Pot on the way to meeting the Beatles.  Stay at the One&Only first, and this place looks like the work of god  . You will arrive here and love everything.

There is a good hotel in here, but as expected, not a great on  . The refurb has done exactly what it intended, and it is now an easy choice as to where to stay if you’re coming to Mauritiu  . The lobby is the best place on the islan  . The gym, very nic  . The rooms are decen  . Prices are fair.

The problem is that the beach is the reason people come to Mauritius, and here it’s grainy sand, a warning board, and a main pool area that looks like they filmed Chernobyl here and forgot to take the set down.

Would I go bac  ? Nah, I’d rather be elsewher  . But if I did feel a need to come to Mauritius (to repeat: I do not), I would certainly come back to the Four Season  . I’d just be sure to choose the room properly, and I’d stay somewhere near the middle of the resort so I didn’t get to the end of the day feeling like I’d conquered Everest.

Just don’t come for the beac  . And bring your own bike.