I just got back from Fantasy Island a few days ago, and my experiences differed greatly from the OP.
For my buddy and I the resort was exactly what we had expected going in......a wonderful location, with an average hotel, with average rooms, and average food. The hotel staff was, for the most part, not overly friendly (Aside from a few people)...but at the same time I dont think I have high expections, or needs for that matter, from the staff. I didnt notice any renovations going on while we were there, and while you could probably make a case that the rooms are in need of some remodeling, please dont forget this is a small island, in a third world country, where they are only charging people around $100 per day for hotel/food/unlimited diving, so once again for me it perfectly met my expectations.
Moving on to the diving......I thought the diving was amazing. While I certainly wont try to convince anyone that there was an overabundance of large maring life, we did still see our share of large grouper (every night dive we did on the prince albert there were a few that would sneek up on you in the dark), dog snapper, lobsters, king crabs, large morays (many out free swimming), we even saw a turtle and a shark.....Now having said that.........these werent the things that I came to Roatan to see, I really enjoy the small maring life, and on every dive the macro life was amazing. On almost every dive we would find Juvenile Drums, Flamingo Tounges, File Fish, Sea Horsers, small decorator crabs, banded coral shrimp, etc. etc. etc. The big catch here is that both finding and seeing many of the things in Roatan takes a certain amount of skill, and I know for a fact that there were many divers in our group who did not get the same amount of enjoyment out of the diving in roatan simply because they didnt possess the bouyancy skills, and or observation skills required to find and see much of the life (on a couple of dives I would have swore that the boat captain had offered free drinks to the divers that could get to the end of the reef and back in the shortest amount of time)
We also had the good fortune of diving with a very good DM (Marcos....who was only working part time at fantasy for two weeks, but worked for around 20 years at Coco View before having to quit diving for 6 months due to ear problems) who would constantly help us to find many many critters.
To me I though the dive shop was well run also, and I didnt see any of the dive boats break down while we were there......my only pet peeve is having so many divers on each boat. Generally I try to avoid diving in places with 15-20 people on the boats, but here it was inevitable. My biggest concern with this type of diving is having to turn dives, or come up when the first person gets low on air, However, this didnt turn out to be much of an issue for me because the reef/marine life was fantastic even in the shallows, and our DM really just let everyone come back to the boat on their own schedules (I was able to average around 60 minute dives).
So like I said Fantasy Island was exactly what I would have expected, and I thoroughly enjoyed.......Would I go Back? Absolutely would go back, but there are many places that I will likely go first.
Brian
