Lux Belle Mare (Mr. & Mrs. Smith): Bottom Line Review

When I checked in to LUX* Belle Mare in Mauritius, I had no intention to write a review. I booked this stay through Hotels.com using gift cards I redeemed from Capital One Shopping (stacked with a price guarantee claim that I wrote about here). However, our stay was so good that I felt like I had to write a review — we just kept being pleasantly surprised by various aspects of the hotel and service. It wasn’t until I checked out and sat down to write this review that I realized that Lux Belle Mare is a Mrs. & Mrs. Smith property! While this one doesn’t appear to be bookable through Hyatt, a couple of the other “Lux” properties in Mauritius are bookable via Hyatt — and if they are anything like this one, they are probably worth considering should your travels bring you to Mauritius.

Lux Belle Mare: Bottom Line Review

Lux Belle Mare is a beautiful hotel on a gorgeous, serene beach with outstanding service and plenty of really nice touches. From the complimentary breakfast they extended when we arrived really early (around 8am) to the courtesy room they provide to shower and change when you have a late flight (as we did), it really feels like they’ve thought of everything. I’ve been fortunate to stay at many luxury properties, but rarely have I felt so relaxed. Almost every staff member I encountered stopped to say hello every day, breakfast was among the best I’ve ever had, and once we arrived we didn’t touch our luggage again apart from unpacking and repacking. The kids’ club had fun activities, the restaurant food was very good, the beach chairs were well padded and well shaded — it’s very hard to find a place to find fault. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the hotel is a destination of its own — I wouldn’t fly all the way to Mauritius just to experience it — but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to a family member or friend.

• Price: Originally about $362 per night for a bed & breakfast rate, though my successful Hotels.com price guarantee claim got me back about $45 per night and I got an additional ~$20 back per night in Capital One Shopping cash back for a “net” rate of around $300 per night.
• Value: I didn’t use hotel rewards, so it’s hard to assess value, though this was among the better prices for a luxury resort on the island for my dates, particularly for a room that accommodates four guests (the Hilton was less expensive for a standard room for 2 or 3 people (around $250 per night), but I read in reviews that they wouldn’t accommodate 4 in a standard room at that property and the room type that would accommodate 4 guests was $675 per night, which is why we ended up at Lux Belle Mare). I’ll add that the breakfast-inclusive rate at Lux Belle Mare was a much better deal versus the price to buy the Lux Belle Mare breakfast buffet (and it was an excellent buffet, so you want it if you’re going to stay here). There are certainly cheaper places to stay in Mauritius, but I’ve read the Mauritius is known in Europe as an “affordable luxury” destination, and this resort fits the bill in that regard.
• Location: This is a beachfront resort with an excellent, wide, calm beach with plenty of shallow, very clear water for the kids to splash around and play. I walked down the beach a distance to see the next couple of hotels south and they didn’t seem to have beaches as extensive as this one. The next hotel north also had an excellent stretch of beach and you could easily walk along the coast to it.
• Room: We had a “junior suite” because that was the first available room type that accommodated four people. No complimentary upgrade was offered, which was no surprise at all given that we’d booked through an online travel agency. The room itself was very spacious and clean. Furniture and fixtures were all good quality. Outlets were international-style, which is something I really appreciate. The balcony had plenty of space for all four of us to hang out, though the table only had two chairs.
• Parking: Parking was free and semi-valet, which is to say that they parked the car and gave me the keys back, which was kind of nice since at times we needed to get something we’d forgotten in the car.
• Resort/Destination Fee: None.
• Internet: Surprisingly fast. I was getting 260 Mbps up and down and very little jitter. Apart from one short glitch, video conferences were clear and seamless. I was very happy with how well it worked.
• Service: Standout excellent. From the moment we arrived, we didn’t touch our bags apart from unpacking — they got unloaded from the car and whisked around right up until the end of the stay. As we were walking out of the complimentary shower room on the last day (we’d checked out at 11am but stayed at the resort until about 5:30pm), I had a bag in my hand and I said it was no problem for me to carry it. The gentleman assisting said, “But sir, you are still on holiday” as he took it out of my hand to put in the golf cart and ride us back to the parking lot and directly to our car, which he remembered without me needing to identify it. Almost everyone we passed turned to say hello day after day. Beach chairs had buttons to call someone over to take a drink order. When we arrived at 8am and a room wasn’t ready, they offered us complimentary breakfast and use of a complimentary shower room (which was a private room with a living area that included a small couch and a desk with vanity and large space to place bags and a separate bathroom / shower) to freshen up and change into beach clothes for the day (the same shower room was offered on the day of departure). My three year old has a very limited palate, but the beach restaurant where we often ate lunch or dinner went above and beyond in preparing stuff that wasn’t on the menu. This made for a very relaxing stay.
• Turndown service: Offered nightly, though our kids are in bed early enough that we generally turned it down or just took more water (they delivered unlimited complimentary bottled water to the room and quickly became good at gauging how much we used per day and then proactively provided enough that we often didn’t need it at turndown.
• Dining:
  • Breakfast (Mondo restaurant, 7am-10:30am): Breakfast was fantastic. I would put this among the best hotel/resort breakfasts I’ve had anywhere (maybe not #1 or #2, but then I can’t immediately decide what those would be if not this). Every day, there were crêpes, pancakes, and waffles with the widest assortment of condiments I’ve ever seen for those, there was a omelet station, there were other eggs (my wife loved the Turkish Eggs, which were poached and in yoghurt reminiscent of tzatziki), there was a noodle bar, there was an Indian / South Asian station (with daily changes to the dishes), there was a dim sum station, there were endless breads (sourdough, rye, multi-grain, mini baguettes, croissants, pretzels, etc), endless pastries (berliners, almond puff pastries, flan cakes, brownies, pistachio cream croissants, pineapple Danishes, and so many more), there was a yoghurt station with different yoghurts (flavors as well as Greek style) and toppings, there were various cold meats and cheeses as well as various types of hot breakfast meats, there was muesli, chia seed pudding, daily fresh pressed juices included apple, orange, pineapple, mango, green apple, and grapefruit (yes, they had all of those every day), there was a kids corner with cereals and simpler breakfast staples, and I’m sure I’m missing a number of things. We ate so much as breakfast that we skipped lunch almost every day and ate an early dinner.
  • Dinner restaurants: Duck Laundry (Chinese, family style and specializing in Peking duck), AMARI BY VINEET (Contemporary Indian headed by the first Indian chef to be awarded a Michelin star), Mondo (buffet / chef station style for dinner), Beach Rouge (a beachside restaurant with (tasty) pizzas, burgers, fish & chips, mezze platters, and that sort of fare) and there were a few bars/cafes, there was a “food truck” concept at the beach called Royce Street (the food truck was connected to an actual Rolls Royce), and there was an ice cream stand by the pool. Given my 3yr old’s limited range, we ended up missing out on most of these. We ate most dinners at Beach Rouge and also ordered food at our beach chairs on the ocean (each umbrella had a button to call for service).

• Spa: We only quickly popped in. I have a price list picture below.
• Fitness Room: Pretty extensive. I forgot to take pictures, but they had a range or machines / steppers / etc as well as yoga mats and a separate Pilates studio.
• Elite Benefits: Note that I booked through Hotels.com rather than Mr. & Mrs. Smith and this property isn’t affiliated with Hyatt, so there were no elite benefits. Nonetheless, I’ll address a couple of common elite benefit-type items below as they are applicable.
  • Room Upgrade:  None, but the resort was close to capacity (the only “upgrade” that appeared to be available before check-in was the same room but with a pool view, which wouldn’t have been better (and in fact may have been worse since the bar by the pool was sometimes loud at night). I expected no upgrade since I’d booked through an OTA instead of direct. From that standpoint, I was glad to not get a parking lot view (which I don’t think exists here).
  • Late Checkout: None available, and the resort seemed to legitimately be sold out the day we left (our flight wasn’t until 11pm, so I looked over the last couple of days to see if I could just pay for another night to have the room all day, but the hotel came up sold out both direct and on all of the third-party OTAs).
  • Welcome Amenity: We were welcomed with some sort of juice drink that was delicious. In the room, everyone receives a couple of small pieces of passionfruit cake.
• Would I stay again?  I’d certainly be happy to, though the truth is that we ended up spending so much time lazily relaxing at Lux Belle Mare that we didn’t explore as much of Mauritius as I’d hoped, so if I returned I might rather see a different part of the island — but I’d probably consider one of the other Lux properties over anything else based on our experience at Lux Belle Mare.

Luxe Belle Mare Pros

• Excellent service
• Amazing breakfast with almost everything you could possibly want
• Beautiful, powdery white sand stretch of beach with plenty of shallow water and also a section that is deeper. We constantly saw fish jumping out of the water — and I’m talking fish about a foot long, possibly a little longer. We saw someone fishing one day, so we got to see them up close and they were not small.
• Range of restaurants
• Prices for food and drinks were less than other far-flung island destinations like Bora-Bora and the Maldives (though certainly more expensive on-property than in the surrounding area). As an example, entrées at Beach Rouge were $10-$20 and a glass of wine was about $10. Buying on average one meal a day on-property, we spent $530 over 5 nights. That was probably less than most people would spend as we didn’t go all out on any meals apart from breakfast, but at the same time you could eat for far less at off-property restaurants (though we only ended up doing that one time).
• Many complimentary daily activities, particularly for kids. We did a family scavenger hunt and our kids won a prize for it and they had fun activities at the kids’ club like face painting, ice cream tasting, pizza making, zumba, etc.

Lux Belle Mare Cons

• It’s a bit of a windy drive from the airport for those who suffer from motion sickness. Our 3yr old gets carsick easily in rental cars (I think because he’s sitting lower with our travel boosters than with his car seat at home?). We had to pull over for him to be sick about 12 minutes into the hour-long drive to the hotel. That was the first of four such stops on the way. Don’t let that scare you away — our kids were fine with Dramamine on the way back to the airport and on the day we visited the sugar museum, but be aware that driving occurs on narrow, sometimes bumpy island roads.
• There’s what I think is a green algae that washes up all over the beach in the mornings. Hotel staff rake it all up and remove it every day, but you see a good bit of it on the sea floor in the deeper sections of ocean.

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