Incredibly disappointing. My friend and I typically go to the Sec He Spa in Palm Springs, which is…read morea completely wonderful experience every time. They were fully booked for the day that we wanted to come, and suggested that we try their "sister spa" at Agua Caliente: Sunstone. It was a completely different experience in every way, and I don't know how anyone who has experienced Sec He would be happy with Sunstone, especially when they are about the same price for treatments. Here were the differences:
When we arrived and were brought into the spa area by an attendent, she was unsmiling, not welcoming and did the very basics. The spa is about 1/4 the size of Sec He, with none of the beauty in the detail and design-very bland and unattractive...similar to a doctor's office-especially the tiny room where you wait for treatments. It has very few options for anything...tiny sauna, tiny steam room and the salt chamber was literally a plastic box that holds a single person at a time. My friend commented that it looked like the penalty box at a hockey game. At Sec He, by comparison, their salt room is a beautiful ROOM where multiple people can take the salt in a large space. When we wanted to actually use the salt penalty box, we had to hunt down an attendent both times to add the salt to the machine and that took time and was aggravating trying to find them as there seemed to be only two attendents working.
We decided to experience the grounding room: nice zero gravity chairs with headphones and a choice of listening experiences. Great....except that the grounding room is a pass through to the other areas of the spa and the entire time you are in there people are walking through, talking, laughing, including the attendents and treatment staff who would come in looking for people waiting for treatments...(why not the waiting room??). The doors on each end of the grounding room have LOUD door handles so every single time someone came through you had two sets of jangly door handles announcing their entry and exit. Such a terrible design, and the staff do nothing to try and keep the area quiet and zen as it should be.
By about 11:30, we had pretty much exhausted all the spa had to offer so went out to the pool to order lunch. We had been told that we could order "room service" from there, but there were no waiters and we finally had to go hunt someone down to find one. We were presented with the regular room service menu for the hotel next door, (no "spa food" or refreshing drinks, juices, etc that you typically expect at a spa) waited again for a waiter to take our order, and about 45 minutes later, our order came out in plastic to go containers in a plastic bag. Hardly a spa experience. The food was just meh.
We both had massages scheduled in the afternoon and both of them were just OK. The massage rooms are nice, with great massage beds with lots of features, but I asked for the deep tissue massage and it was not....very inconsistent and very light touch, and my friend got the massage that is supposed to combine multiple different styles and she also felt that is was just OK.
In a world with many, many bigger problems than a bad spa day, you may wonder why I would take the time to complain about that. But the reality is, between my friend and myself, we spent over $600 at Sunstone for what was a very subpar experience. We never felt "attended to" or welcomed by the staff, the spa itself leaves much to be desired, the locker room is tiny and makes it difficult for people to change and manage their items in there, but there is only one private dressing room. There were so many disappointments with this experience and we both work hard for our money. I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a great experience to go to Sec He in Palm Springs-especially since they have the private mineral baths as part of your experience. It boggles my mind that the same tribe would call these "sister spas" when they are NOTHING alike in quality, options, services, size, decor and experience. Save your money. You probably work hard for it too.
