my family and i returned this year after a nice stay last summer. this time it was a nightmare! we booked the largest penthouse available and we were disgusted! it was filthy, the doors to the balcony didn't lock (we have 3 year old twins!), the baseboards had dried food and drink spilled all over them, the fan had dust 3 inches thick...sick. so, i called to the desk and we were moved to a 3 bed room unit. it, too, was dirty, but at least the doors locked! we didn't get compensation for repacking and moving to another tower after driving 12 hours! the hot tub didn't work, the pools were freezing cold (in the middle of august), the grills were burned out and our smoke detector was in the nightstand drawer! the grounds were bad with dead plants, cigarette butts and garbage smell. we will NOT be back!

We (4 adults, 4 kids) spent a week at Splash in July, 2008. Our units were beautiful. The staff was friendly. Water related activities for the kids were wonderful....lazy river, water park, various pools. Plenty of parking across the street with a covered air conditioned sky bridge connecting the parking deck to the condos. Finding a luggage cart was difficult, but we got one.

It is a heaven for kids, but there are drawbacks for us adults. The beach was JAM PACKED, elbow-to-elbow. It was also very dirty. My biggest complaint was one that Splash management has no control over but it should be a concern of anyone considering taking their family to this place. Panama City pipes their stormwater runoff directly into the beach. This may be done in other beach locations too, but I have never seen it before. There is a pipe only a few yards away from the Splash beach front. It rained on Saturday and within an hour of the rain, a river of filthy, black water was piped directly into the ocean right were our kids had been swimming hours earlier. From our 12th floor condo it was easy to see how this water stained the entire swimming area. Within 2 hours the beach water in front of the entire Splash property was black and filthy....no way I would swim in that. Beware!!! That problem alone will keep me from going back there in the future. No excuse for that kind of filthy water being pumped directly into a swimming area.

I stayed June 20-27 2008. The beach is nice but very crowded. Beach service was friendly but extremely crowded. The pools are great for the kids but you must go through lord of the flies type combat daily to get a chair on the pool decks. The water was cloudy. The hot tub was cold for 3 of the 7 days. For this kind of money check out the Caribe in gulf shores with much bigger pools without combat for seating. Not on the beach (across the street). Most of the pool people started their bud lights by 9am. You can do better for the money.The wait for the elevator was incredibly long.

My family and I just returned, one day early, from a planned week-long stay at Splash. It was undoubtedly the worst vacation we've ever had. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm. There were no places to park and unload, only to park and "check in" which wasn't necessary for us as we had prepaid. We were one of the few lucky families that snagged a cart, but we still had to wait a ridiculously long time for one of the two small elevators, that served the entire west tower, in order to go to our unit. The cleaning crew showed up 15 minutes prior to our appointed check-in time, and did a poor job cleaning our unit in about 35 minutes. The pictures on the web do a great job in selling to the kids, but they do not represent the actual experience. The adult-only pools and hot tub were freezing and full of kids - no rules are enforced. People were fighting over chairs by the pools. If you sat in the sunny areas, you risked getting trash, drinks, and lit cigarette butts dropped on you from the floors above. The "water park" area was a joke, with two small slides that weren't suitable for our 8 and 10 year olds. The game room was tiny and overpriced. The lunch counter/bar was over priced. The beach in front of the "resort" was overcrowded and nasty - we ended up hiking about a quarter mile up the beach for a little space. Again, the elevators were a nightmare - if you didn't move in and out quickly, the doors would close on you. The only good thing I can say about the place is that our unit was pretty and the air conditioning worked - but our unit is privately owned. The overall experience was horrible and we will never be back. We spent over $2,000 on the condo rental alone, and it makes me sick to know we wasted hard-earned money.

The resort's elevators are overcrowded during peek times, like holidays and July weekends. Don't book then. We went for the second week in August and rarely waited over a minute for an elevator.

Other than that, the place is perfect for families with small kids. The pools are exceptional, rooms immaculate, everything is clean and beautiful. We bought all kinds of Kitchen stuff with us, but needed next to nothing. They even have a single packet of soap for the dishwasher and clothes washer. Their convenience store has lots of things, but prices are almost double grocery stores. Publix and Win Dixie grocery stores are near by. The beach is nice, but not a sugar white as 7 miles to the West. Service is good, but nothing to rave about. They get the job done. The Gym is well equipped, but bring your own headphones for the ellipticals with TVs. We had a problem with two of our four of our card keys, but had to live with it because they'd have to re-author all of them to fix the two bad ones, and we could never get everyone all together for that.

It's really an exceptional family place, especially for kids aged 2-8

The only reason this place gets a two is because the room was beautiful. However, there arent enough elevators. The Condo has several maintnence glitches that need to be worked out. Additionally the pools were over run with unsupervised kids. I will not go back and I would not recomend this to anyone I like.