Tropical respite: a week in St Kitts
An honest review of the Park Hyatt St Kitts, how I pack for trips, and my favorite outfits I wore on the island
I love the feeling of the lead-up to the first vacation of the year, don’t you? For 2024’s inaugural trip, my husband and I decided on a beach vacation in search of much-needed respite after last year’s jam-packed, city-trekking travel. For our destination, we settled on St Kitts—chosen because of a hotel, of course. After having incredible experiences at two Park Hyatt hotels in Japan last year, we decided to stay at another Park Hyatt property, this time only a four-hour flight from our home base in New York: the Park Hyatt St Kitts.
But we weren’t just looking for a quick flight from the East Coast and sandy shores. We booked this trip to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, and we trusted that any Park Hyatt would take great care of us. So, the choice to book PHSK was a no-brainer.
When I posted the trip on Instagram, messages came flooding in both remarking on how amazing the trip looked and asking about the property. In an effort to be fully transparent about the former and to try to properly answer the latter, here’s a full and honest breakdown of my experience.
What was good
The hotel grounds. The entire property was a lot bigger than I was expecting; to give you a sense of the scale, golf carts shuttle guests and luggage between the hotel’s 126 rooms. From the moment you step out of the lobby and onto the property, you’re greeted by lush greenery, a vivid swath of flowers, and (hopefully) azure skies. The hotel takes great pride in its myriad foliage, and it shows. As you walk the grounds, you’ll come across an array of imported flowers and trees, each with placards that inform you of its scientific name and place of origin. I really enjoyed taking in the variety of textures and colors each day.
Our room. We booked a Beachside King Room on the ground floor with a patio. Here’s what I appreciated most about the room: The bed was very comfortable. I really liked that you could control the lighting for the entire room from each bedside. I loved that there was a spacious walk-in closet that I could unpack all my stuff into (because yes, this is the kind of traveler I am). In the bathroom, my favorite design detail was that, next to each mirror, there is a small shelf—a very practical, creative use of vertical space.
The occupancy. This is a really important detail that I think most people tend to overlook when booking vacations where you’re not leaving the hotel much: you don’t want the place to feel too crowded. Luckily, it never did for us. At no point did we have to fight for prime real estate at the pool or beach. No matter how late we arrived, we always got a great spot. In fact, the hotel does a great job at making sure that most of the spots are great spots. The more popular Lagoon Pool is massive, so even if you’re sharing it with people, it never feels like you’re on top of each other, and we never saw more than a couple of other people at the smaller, adults-only Ramparts Pool.
The fine dining restaurant. The most upscale option, Stone Barn, offers a tasting menu inspired by the elements that is as delicious as it is inventive. For two people, without the wine pairing or cocktails, you can expect to spend around $500 (this includes tax and an 18% gratuity).
What was fine
The food. For the amount the hotel charges for the food, I expected to enjoy it much more than I did, but by day three, I was really tired of what was on offer. The hotel does have a variety of options in terms of places to eat, but there were only a couple of dishes that we ordered throughout our entire stay that we really enjoyed (with the exception of Stone Barn).
What was bad
Housekeeping. If I’m staying at a five-star hotel, I kind of expect my room to be cleaned every day. Or is that just me? For some reason, housekeeping only came twice during our entire stay, and the service was only fully completed once.
Communication between staff. During our stay, we wasted a lot of time dealing with small issues, talking to staff members to resolve them, and then untangling the miscommunications that would occur as a result of those staff members playing telephone with each other (or not communicating at all). It’s frustrating that a hotel of this caliber can’t seem to get their shit together.
Overall, the hotel was beautiful and comfortable, but consistently disappointing service put a damper on our stay. My recommendations: 1) You’ll likely have a better experience if you spend more time than we did outside of the hotel (which is disappointing for how much it costs to stay there). We only ventured off-property once, but if we could go back we’d take the ferry over to Nevis for dinner at the Four Seasons for a night. 2) We felt our stay was a bit too long. If we could re-plan this trip, three to four days seems like the perfect amount of time.
What I wore
I only purchased two new things for this trip—a massive feat for me. I really challenged myself to get creative with finding new ways to style things I already had in my closet and I feel really good about how I did. I love how my outfits came together! Here are some of my wardrobe workhorses from the trip:
I also thought it’d be fun to give you a peek into how I plan outfits for a trip. I’ll warn you: it’s gonna look intense, but trust me—it’s immensely helpful, both when it comes to packing and in keeping me organized. First, whenever I buy something, I save a photo of it to my Pinterest. This helps with the second step: making an outfit moodboard in Google Slides. Each slide has one outfit, and the number of slides is determined by the number of days and nights in the trip. I add photos of all the items I want to bring and start piecing them together into looks to make sure they visually work well together. Once I’m happy with everything (after trying it all on IRL, of course), all of the items from the outfits are listed by category in a spreadsheet (i.e. tops, bottoms, dresses, etc.). That way, when I’m ready to pack my suitcase, I can simply take the list to my closet, grab everything I need, and ensure that nothing gets left behind.
Bonus! Jetblue review
I flew JetBlue for the first time and…I have thoughts. I know the experience of flying has degraded considerably since its golden age but why, of all things, must airlines put the thinnest possible seats in their cabins? I shouldn’t feel like someone is punching me in the back when they’re simply reaching for things in their seatback pocket, and yet this was my experience for the entirety of my four-hour flight to St Kitts in row 2 of one of Jet Blue’s A320s. This is part of the reason why I’m so loyal to Delta. I’m not so naive to think that they won’t cost-cut to the point of thinner seats in the future, but at least they’re not there yet—even on their regional jets! That’s the craziest part to me: that I’m more comfortable flying in an economy seat in one of Delta’s ERJ-175’s (approx. 70 seats) vs. an “Even More Space” seat on one of JetBlue’s A320’s (approx. 150 seats). Reminds me of earlier this year when Southwest debuted their “updated” (heavy on the air quotes) seat design to an astounding (and, in my opinion, deserved) amount of passenger backlash (someone hilariously called them the “Ozempic of airline seats”—they’re not wrong!). Anyway, I sat in the emergency exit row on the way back to New York so this was me for the entirety of the flight (I’ve never had an original experience).
Window Seat Airlines 🛫
Bringing you a 30,000-foot view of need-to-know travel industry news:
How can we continue to innovate business class seats? It’s a great question: seats can’t get any flatter and space is expensive. A new, next-gen business class concept called Maya features a 45” ultra-wide, ultra-HD OLED Astrova Curve display that is three times larger than typical plane screens. It even puts Emirates First Class 32-inch display to shame—currently the largest screen available on any aircraft. It’s just a concept for now, but fun to think about seeing this in the sky someday.
About time…Southwest fares are now available on Google Flights. This isn’t the only change from the airline; the CEO announced they’re looking into potential alternatives to its long-standing open seat policy and they’re planning to finally introduce red-eye flights in the coming years. Do they know what year it is? Get with the times, guys. I always forget this airline exists.
We just had a new busiest travel day ever. May 24th broke the previous record for the busiest travel day ever (Nov 26th, 2023) with 2.95 million passengers screened by TSA on Friday of Memorial Day weekend.
I really liked this article about how to be a better tourist.
It’s not just you! If I stay at (any) hotel, I’m looking for daily housekeeping! You definitely suffered too many annoyances there, appreciate the transparency. Looks gorgeous though!!
Oh man I’m sorry to read this! Had a lovely trip there in 2019. So appreciate the fresh insight.