Review: Wyndham Resort Denarau Island, Fiji

I have a slightly different relationship with Wyndham Resort Denarau Island than I do with most hotels I review. I didn’t choose it after comparing rates, redemption values or elite benefits. It is the primary resort associated with my parents’ Wyndham timeshare membership, and over the years it has become one of the places where our increasingly scattered family has managed to reconvene.

My parents spend two or three weeks here most years, often bringing family or friends for at least part of the stay. I’ve now stayed three times myself. The first was with my wife and all our kids, meeting my parents, siblings and their families. The second was another extended-family trip, although with a slightly smaller cast. This time it was my parents, my siblings and their spouses, with me arriving from London via Singapore a day after everyone else.

That history changes what I’m looking for in the resort. I know what it is like with children and without them, and I’ve seen it several years apart. More importantly, I’ve seen why this particular style of accommodation works unusually well for a large family gathering.

The units we’ve typically used at Denarau are two- and three-bedroom apartments. The three-bedroom units are particularly sought after, to the point that my parents book theirs 13 months ahead when the inventory becomes available. These are proper apartments rather than oversized hotel rooms.

There is a full kitchen, dining area and living room, along with enough communal space that a group can actually spend time together without constantly decamping to a restaurant or hotel lobby.

The larger units can accommodate up to four couples by using the pull-down bed in the living area, while the two-bedroom units can accommodate three couples the same way.

That flexibility is one of the property’s strongest features, although there is a difference between can accommodate and would ideally accommodate. Since I was traveling without my wife this time and arrived after everybody else, I naturally inherited the pull-down bed in the living room. It worked well enough, although I’m not sure I’d volunteer for it for a long stay.

Jet lag was part of the problem. Everyone else was already on roughly the right clock, while I’d come from London. I tend to wake very early for the first few days after a journey like that, do some work and then disappear for an hour or two later in the day. When your bedroom is also everybody else’s living room, disappearing becomes difficult. Fortunately there are enough quiet spots and poolside loungers around the resort that I could usually find somewhere else to retreat.

The photographs of the apartment are consequently a little thinner than I’d normally want for a hotel review. By the time I arrived, several other people had already moved in, so these were taken at the end of the stay as we were leaving rather than when everything was pristine on arrival.

Having a full kitchen might sound slightly beside the point at a tropical resort with restaurants and poolside dining. In practice, it is one of the things that makes Wyndham particularly good for a group.

We certainly ate out.

But we could also make our own breakfasts, keep drinks and groceries in the apartment, and cook a couple of dinners ourselves.

Meals could be eaten around the indoor dining table or outside on the deck, which in our case overlooked the adults’ pool and central resort area.

That produces a different rhythm from seven people staying in separate hotel rooms. Nobody has to organize breakfast. Not every evening needs a reservation. People can wander in and out, make coffee, sit outside, cook something or head down to the pool.

For a family trip, that distinction is significant. The accommodation becomes part of the gathering rather than simply where everybody sleeps.

The photographs probably explain Wyndham Denarau better than a list of facilities could.

The accommodation blocks sit among dense tropical planting, linked by wooden boardwalks over shallow waterways and gardens.

Palm trees, pandanus, carved figures, rope railings and bamboo-style torches give the resort a distinctly Fijian feel. It isn’t trying to be a sleek international luxury hotel, and I’m glad it isn’t.

There are pools, restaurants and bars, including the Rum & Beer Bar, and plenty of outdoor space.

The architecture and rooms aren’t especially glamorous. Some elements show their age. But the whole thing feels relaxed and remarkably well suited to spending a week with other people.

Having returned several times, I’ve also noticed something that is harder to capture in photographs. The place becomes familiar quickly.

A couple of staff members remembered me from our previous visit three years earlier and immediately asked, “Where’s the family?” They meant my wife and kids. There had been some staff turnover in the intervening years, but that sort of recognition says something about the atmosphere Wyndham manages to create.

Our earlier visits were much more child-focused, and Wyndham was extremely good at that.

There seemed to be something happening every day. Our kids kayaked in the ocean, tie-dyed shirts, joined pool aerobics and even helped catch frogs for the resort’s frog race. This time the program initially felt a little quieter, perhaps because our first few days were overcast and fewer people were congregating around the pools, or perhaps simply because I was no longer experiencing the resort through children’s eyes.

Once the activities got going, though, the same personality was still there.

One evening around the adults’ pool, the MC ran a guess-the-artist music game built largely around half-forgotten songs from the 1980s onward. Guests sitting on the surrounding balconies and decks started shouting answers down to the pool.

It’s a small thing, but it explains the resort rather well. For an hour, a collection of unrelated families occupying different apartments became something resembling the inhabitants of a little town square. There was Bula Bingo too, because in Fiji almost anything can apparently be improved by putting “Bula” in front of it.

There is another layer here that I wouldn’t normally encounter at a conventional hotel.

My parents make extensive use of their Wyndham ownership and have reached its 100 Club level. On this visit, the associated event was billed as a cooking class. The resort chef prepared a local fish and coconut soup or stew with coriander, onion, ginger, cucumber and other ingredients while everyone drank complimentary wine and cocktails, talked with members of the resort team and eventually consumed multiple bowls of what he’d made.

Previous visits have brought different events. One involved cocktail making and another focused on Fijian culture, including preparing and drinking kava. We’ve also encountered cultural dinners, dancers and fire performances during stays.

My experience of my parents’ Wyndham ownership is really about what it has allowed them to do. They use it extensively, both here and elsewhere, and regularly bring family and friends with them. Denarau in particular has given us several terrific extended-family trips that would have been much harder to replicate with a collection of conventional hotel rooms.

That helps explain why Wyndham has become such an established part of how my parents travel. They get a great deal of use from it, and for our family Denarau has become much more than somewhere they happen to have accommodation.

You can quite easily spend days at Wyndham without going very far, but Denarau is set up to make movement between the resorts straightforward.

The Bula Bus circulates between the Denarau resorts and Port Denarau, where you’ll find shops and restaurants as well as the ferries and excursion boats heading out to the islands. I’ve used it on previous visits, although this time I mostly walked. I went to the port a couple of times and also walked along as far as the Hilton.

There is also the Westbus into Nadi, used by both visitors and many of the people who work at the Denarau resorts.

We’ve generally used that when we want to go to the market for local produce, which we did once on this trip.

Port Denarau also opens up the obvious excursions beyond the resort itself: island day trips, village visits and various other boat trips.

You don’t need to treat Denarau as an isolated compound unless you want to.

I wouldn’t rank Wyndham Denarau among Fiji’s most luxurious resorts, and doing so would rather miss the point.

Its great strength is the way it accommodates people. A conventional resort can put seven or eight members of a family into three or four hotel rooms. Wyndham can put them into an apartment where they can cook breakfast together, sit around a table, have drinks on the deck, spend the afternoon separately and then gradually reconvene without anybody needing to organize it.

I’ve experienced that with children running off to resort activities and, now, with a group consisting entirely of adults. It works in both versions.

There are compromises. The person relegated to the pull-down bed may eventually crave a door of his own. The rooms themselves are practical rather than luxurious. And on this visit the activities program didn’t feel quite as relentless as I remembered from earlier family stays. None of those observations really changed my view of the place.

My parents return for two or three weeks almost every year. The coveted three-bedroom apartment gets booked as soon as the calendar opens. Different combinations of children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses and friends have joined them over the years.

After three stays, I understand why.

Wyndham Denarau isn’t the sort of resort I’d cross the world to experience because of the room, the restaurant or an infinity pool. Its appeal is more specific than that. It provides a remarkably easy place for people who live a long way from one another to spend a week living together again.

For our family, that has turned out to be considerably more valuable.

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