If It Has Family-Style Dining, It's Not a Romantic Resort.

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But I found one thing odd. Once we landed and got settled into our first lunch at the resort, we realized every meal was family style. We learned that, indeed, we’d eat each breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the 28 other guests. We’d come expecting a little more intimacy and privacy for our anniversary.

And apparently, family-style is having a moment. Off Grid Girona, a boutique hotel in a 17th-century Spanish farmhouse, seats every guest at one poolside table and markets it as “relaxed family-style communal dining.” Puglia’s Palazzo Daniele built a whole common room for the same purpose, and even Marriott has leaned in with a 2026 “Across the Table” series at places like the St. Regis Maldives and the Ritz-Carlton Kyoto, all on the promise that a shared meal turns strangers into friends. On safari it’s practically the default. This isn’t one island’s quirk: the long communal table has become a genre, and everyone sells it as a means of connection.

Here, there was nowhere to just be alone, just like the summer camps you went to when you were twelve. That’s not a knock on camp. Camp can be fun, and with middle-school crushes, there was always some romance. But the point is that camp and privacy, and the romance that depends on it, are opposites. It’s a private island that didn’t actually feel private.

Stunning Turtle Island, Fiji. Photo: Kelsey Wilking

Luxury experiences can absolutely include family-style dining. Your safari lodge, a communal farmhouse with farm-to-table fare, a famous chef’s experimental tasting menu: all of that can be five-star, long table included. But romance, I think, is a different tier altogether. Here’s what I think amorous luxury actually is: underneath all the physical amenities and boxes you have to tick to count as a five-star stay, it’s having time that belongs only to you and your partner. Whatever’s left of your time and space is yours, to spend however you like, including on nothing at all. It can include people, of course. But romance cannot include family-style dining. The whole point of getting away is actually getting away. There’s an Italian phrase for it: dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. Just being.

Here’s how a day at the resort worked. Breakfast with the group. Then a scheduled activity, snorkeling or cave diving. Then lunch, back at the communal table with everyone. Then, at 5:30 PM on the dot, the staff would gather around each bure and sing to remind us that cocktails began at 6 PM. We’d then have drinks, sit down to dinner with the group again, end the night with a round of traditional Fijian kava, and wander back to our bure around 10 PM. Then we’d wake up and do it again.

The author and her husband made the most of the times that did offer more privacy. Photo: Kelsey Wilking

The communal table was the heart of it. Every day, in a dozen small ways, we were reminded that on this island everyone is family. It’s a genuine piece of Fijian hospitality, one that the staff traced all the way from the islands’ cannibal past to Christianity. And when I am traveling for an immersive cultural experience, that is exactly what I’m looking for. But for an adults-only luxury private island built for romance? Somewhere between “Can you please pass the butter?” and “So, what brings you here,” I started to feel the weight of communal mealtimes. And it’s a revolving door. Just as you finally find a groove with one set of people, they check out, and a fresh round of “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?” trivia from hell begins.

The moments that did feel idyllic were the ones we had to arrange for ourselves. You could ask for breakfast to be sent to your bure. You could arrange a day in advance to be dropped alone on one of the island’s sixteen private beaches with a packed picnic, and picked up at a time you named. We did that five times and finally found a space for us where we could roam across long empty stretches of sand, dip our toes in rocky coves with tidepools, snorkel in water so clear you could breathe it in, and every single time, it was the best part of the trip. It wasn’t because the beach was better than the resort, but because, for a few hours, the day was ours.

And when you’re celebrating 15 years with the most attractive man alive, you’d like, occasionally, um, adult time. But we were so wrung out from being “on” all day during mealtimes and activities that we were asleep before our heads hit the pillow. Let me tell you what is not sexy: penciling in intimacy the way you’d pencil in a dentist appointment, just to fit it in before the day’s schedule closes.

The team at Turtle Island. Photo: Kelsey Wilking

None of this is the staff’s fault, and I need to be clear about that. They were, without exaggeration, the best I’ve ever encountered.

You could not pass a single person without a warm “Bula, Bula,” and they folded every guest into their idea of family. One of their mottos is still lodged in my head: “If you’re complaining, you’re on the wrong island.” Fair enough. Plenty of the guests I met adored it: the family-style mealtimes, the new faces at every meal, the built-in company. For an extrovert, I imagine it’s heaven.

And despite my introversion clocking in at 73 percent on two career-mandated Myers-Briggs tests, I adore people. Truly. I’m obsessed with the whimsy of our species, the way we find connection in the smallest things and feel things so deeply. I loved the sonder of it all. Some of the loveliest humans I’ve ever met were on this island. There is something about the people you travel alongside that bonds you strangely and permanently, even if you speak only once a year.

Photos: Kelsey Wilking

We did have a wonderful time. And while this ramble might feel like I am complaining, I loved my time there. But I came home needing a vacation from my vacation, that tired conference-call cliché made suddenly accurate. I’d packed watercolors I never opened and a journal I never wrote in. I’d pictured long, unhurried hours, and instead spent the week being joyfully managed.

Which is how I finally landed on the thing I couldn’t put into words on the flight home. An amorous getaway isn’t the beaches or the thread count or the Michelin-starred food. It’s being handed your own time and trusted to spend it. By that definition, camp, however beautiful, however five-star, can never be truly romantic. Because camp keeps a schedule.

And real romantic luxury lets you choose your own way to be together, whether you want the table full of strangers or just the two of you.

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