Constance Le Prince Maurice Mauritius - Hotel Review

I can't even tell you how many hours I spent looking at honeymoon destinations; I drove myself, and anyone within a mile radius of me, Crazy! The only thing I knew was that we wanted a relaxing beach/resort type holiday, somewhere ‘once-in-a-lifetime’, doesn't that sound easy? Funnily enough, the world is a rather large place and I think I looked at every tropical island from the Caribbean to Thailand to the Maldives.

The one place that kept popping up on all of my searches was Mauritius, so I started doing more research on that specific island. Mauritius is a much bigger island than I thought and the more I researched it the more I realised how much I wanted to go there. So the decision was made on where now the decision of which hotel had to be made. Luckily for me my sister works for British Airways and has a lot of knowledge on what hotels were good and which ones to avoid.

Review sites like Trip Advisor are a fantastic way to research a hotel. My advice is to take every review with a pinch of salt as something that might annoy someone else you might not even notice! Try and read as many reviews as you can, especially if it is for such an important holiday. I used Trip Advisor to make my final choice of hotel, which was Constance - Le Prince Maurice. Their reviews are outstanding on Trip Advisor so I knew it wasn't going to be a risk choosing this resort.

All I had to do now was wait a year and get the actual wedding out of the way! Obviously I am joking, I didn't want to get the wedding out of the way, however a massive part of my excitement for the wedding was knowing we were going to be in Mauritius 2 days later.

This is a review of the whole experience at the hotel Le Prince Maurice, mainly in pictures so I hope you enjoy. I am doing a separate post all about the island so keep an eye out for that.

Flights & Transfers

We flew from Newcastle to London Heathrow and then flew to Mauritius from Gatwick with British Airways. Getting from Heathrow to Gatwick was really easy as we booked a private car to drive us and paid in advance with batransfers.com . It is only a couple £ more than getting the National Express bus and a hell of a lot easier as they work around your flight.

British Airways fly direct from Gatwick and it's a 12 hour flight. I was worried about this as I had never flown that long before but it was absolutely fine; we watched a film, had some food and a few drinks, and then slept. I am happy we did that rather than flying to Dubai.

We had booked our transfer to the hotel through British Airways as well, you just have to make sure you print off your vouchers. Everyone at Mauritius airport was so friendly and we were advised where to go for our pick-up and straight away we got into a lovely clean air-conditioned car to take us to Le Prince Maurice. It takes roughly 1 hour to get to the hotel but it is fascinating watching out the window at this amazing island.

The Hotel

Now onto the main event. I love the feeling of pulling up to a hotel on holiday and walking into it for the first time, our eyes were just wide with excitement and trying to take in what we were actually seeing. Everything is open plan with lots of water features, marble and volcanic stone. The attention to detail hits you straight away. We were greeted immediately by the attentive Demetri and escorted into the main reception area to be seated and given a glass of Champagne each while they checked if our room was ready.

Sitting and enjoying our drink we couldn't believe the view over the main pool area. Well, technically I could believe it as for the past year I think I looked at every picture of Le Prince Maurice ever posted online, but it was very exciting seeing it with my own eyes and taking my own pictures!

Our Room

I don't know if you are the same as me but whenever I go on holiday I am always a little bit hopeful we will end up with a free room upgrade. When I signed all the paperwork I saw that we still had the room we booked which was a junior suite, the first option of room type. I remember telling Thom and sounding a little disappointed even though we had absolutely no right to a room upgrade. The reason I am telling you this is because when Demetri showed us to our room I was blown away with how amazing it was, poor Demetri was trying to give us information on the resort while Thom and I just walked around speechless. All of the junior suites are individual buildings with one up one down. Ours had a water view whereas some have garden views.

The facilities in the room were perfect, the bathroom was bigger than our living room at home. There was a huge deep bath with a separate wet room shower. The first thing I noticed was how clean everything was, every corner of the bathroom was immaculate. Other facilities included a mini-bar with full sized (and full priced!) bottles of spirits, TV with a good selection of free current films, air-conditioning and ceiling fan, telephone, a safe, and a hair dryer. Throughout our stay the room was serviced twice a day, once in the morning and a turndown service a night. I might mention this a few times in this post but the staff were amazing from the first minute, they were so helpful and their standards of cleaning were impeccable.

Whenever Thom and I go anywhere the first thing we like to do is put our bags in our room and go out and explore to get our bearings. The whole resort at Le Prince Maurice is easy to walk around in 10 minutes, it is like a sanctuary rather than a big hotel resort. The grounds are very green and lush with lots of palm trees and flowers.

The Beach

There is one long strip of beach and then another smaller beach next to some villas. We spent most of our time going between the beach and the pool, you know it’s a hard life having to make the decision where to sunbathe. The sand is soft at the top of the beach but as it is built on the coral reef the sand/crushed shells can be sharp on your feet close to the water edge. The service at the beach was amazing, there was plenty of sun loungers and they were all cushioned and incredibly comfortable. The beach staff would be straight over to put out a towel for you and give you some ice cold water bottles, you even had flags you could use if you wanted service like drinks or snacks.

There was also a sunbathing platform in the sea just off the shore that I really wanted to sunbathe on but I am not a great swimmer. Towards the end of the holiday, we realised we could actually walk there when the tide was low which made me laugh as I had been psyching myself up to swim to it all week!

As you can see, I wasn't very good at frisbee when trying to take photos.

The Pool

There is actually 3 pools at Le Prince Maurice, firstly there is the main pool next to the bar and restaurants, which is the largest one out of the 3. Even though the beach is stunning this pool was my favourite area, when it got really hot it was perfect to have a quick dip and swim about. I loved to stand at the infinity pool edge and just take in the surroundings. The service round the pool was just as good as at the beach, every morning Manesh would come and say hello and clean our sunglasses for us, bring us water and lay out our towels. Being waited on hand and foot was really strange for me I think I said thank you 1 million times as I was so grateful for everything. The sun loungers are huge and I fell asleep on them on more than one occasion. It's very tiring doing nothing at all!A few minutes walk from the main pool is the Lap Pool, this one is heated and smaller but stunning to look at. We usually went here later on in the day for a few lengths before we went back to our room. Both the main pool and Lap Pools were infinity pools which created a beautiful illusion of them seamlessly joining the sea, we would gaze at that for hours!The third pool is inside the spa, which I didn't get any photos of as I didn't take anything with me when we went for our spa day. It is small and heated and even though it is the spa you can use it anytime. We had a couples massage at the spa which was 90 minutes of wonderfulness, there was a sauna and steam room there as well and the prices are only a little more than a spa at home.

Watersports

There are lots of watersports you can do for free at Le Prince Maurice. The extent of our adventures stopped with a pedalo and a trip on a glass-bottom boat, but there is also snorkelling, catamarans, windsurfing and waterskiing. Everyone else I watched doing it seemed to be having a great time but me and watersports don't really mix after a banana boat incident in Menorca, but that story is a whole other blog post!

Restaurants & Food

There are 3 restaurants at Le Prince Maurice and all of them are equally outstanding.

Archipel is the main restaurant and the one that is open all week, it is mainly à la carte but we did have a Mauritian style buffet on one of the nights. It is a large restaurant just off the main pool area with a bar attached to it. We ate here most nights as you don't need to book. This restaurant is also open every day for lunch. I loved the stepping stones you could use to get into the restaurant.

Constance Le Prince Maurice boasts having a simply HUGE wine list and wine cellar to match. It is attached to Archipel and even though we weren't going to do any wine tasting we got a chance to go inside for a look, it was a nice escape from the heat! I have never seen so many bottles of wine, I could have gone crazy in there but I don't think my bank balance would have been happy about that!

Le Barachois is the floating restaurant and the one I was most excited to see after looking at the photos online. It is a few minutes’ walk around the bay on a wooden walkway. We went there twice for dinner and it was definitely different, the platforms are as you would expect in a floating restaurant..... .....they float which takes some getting used to when the waiters are walking on and off. It is only open for dinner but even at night the views are fantastic and it is really relaxing watching the fish swim around all of the lights in the water.

Le Barachois actually has a resident shark which was a little unsettling as I have been scared of sharks my whole life! They have named him Jonny and he is a reef shark, it was actually really exciting when the waiter shouted "shark!" and everyone ran with their cameras ready. We were actually lucky enough to get a pic of him.

Just along from Le Barachois is the floating bar, I loved it here as you can have a drink as the sun sets and watch the fishes.

The third restaurant is an Asian food restaurant, we only went here once but the food was very nice and it is small and intimate which I really liked.

All the food pics need to be put all together just to take in the deliciousness of it all. We both loved every meal we had while we stayed at Le Prince Maurice. Every meal was 3 courses which you chose from a selection of dishes, over the 10 days we were there the menu was different every single night.

In Room Dining

I would 100% recommend in-room dining for at least one night. I honestly thought they would just turn up with the tray on the table and leave, which I still would have thought was good service seeing as it is a very little service charge to get breakfast and dinner in your room, but they showed up and set the table just like in the restaurant and it was incredible. Even down to the tiniest of details like decorating the table with a pattern drawn in seeds.

Prices

Le Prince Maurice is not a cheap hotel, but it’s hard for me to say if it is expensive or not as that is all relative to what you are used to paying on holiday. We went half board which means our breakfast and evening meal food were covered, drinks were no included even water, although I don’t think we were charged for the ones they brought us around the pool each day. We didn’t eat lunch every day as breakfast was always so big but the average price for lunch was about £18 for a pizza or pasta, which we would never pay at home but it is different when you are away. The wine prices varied because they have such a huge selection. Even though we tried to buy the cheapest bottle (around £40) it was still a beautiful wine. Cocktails work out at roughly £12, beer (Thom fell in love with the local beer, Pheonix, and even bought six cans to bring home for himself and his friends) came in at around £5.00 a bottle, and glasses of wine (the cheapest) about £9.

Overall

I can say hands down that Le Prince Maurice was perfect. I have never stayed anywhere that focuses on every tiny detail were so apparent. I am not saying everything went without a hitch but I think when issues are dealt with so professionally and everything else is amazing you kind of overlook those things. One night Thom found a piece of plastic in his dessert and told the waiter, he apologised and we left it at that. The next day the head chef found us at breakfast to personally apologise for it and asked if there was anything he could do for us. We were blown away by their naturally attentive nature.

The majority of the staff we interacted with knew our names and would say hello and have a chat. There was always someone on hand if you had a question or needed anything. I casually asked a member of staff if the shop sold paracetamol as my husband (that still sounds strange!) had a headache, the next day she asked Thom if he was feeling better. I know that sounds silly to think it is so great but it’s the tiny details like that that made us have the most amazing honeymoon ever.

I will leave you now with some sunset shots I got on the last day. I have you have enjoyed this post and if you found it because you are researching hotels, we 100% recommend Constance Hotels and especially Le Prince Maurice in Mauritius.