We stayed at Water's Edge Resort in February 2011 while
touring Australia's East Coast. The resort it located up on a hill,
a few minutes walk from Shute Harbour Rd which is the main road of
Airlie Beach. We were there for 4 nights. The apartment was nicely
furnished, the kitchen well equipped, the living room very spacious,
the bedrooms smaller but still with enough space for moving around. We
loved the view from the balcony. We arrived a little after 7.30 pm and
the reception was already closed but we used the courtesy telephone in
the reception area and we were given instructions on how to enter the room.
Not many people seemed to be at the resort when we were there so we had
no problems finding beds by the pool nor were the pools too crowded. All
in all we had a nice stay. I do have one complaint though, related to the
Internet connection. The resort offers connection to Internet through an
external company called "Smartcard" (right! ...) We bought 2 cards of
$30 value only to discover that they didn't actually work from our room
which was on the 2nd floor. They only worked in the reception area and
even then we would get disconnected after a few minutes. We went back to
the reception to ask about this problem but the answer we got was a shrug.
They couldn't buy back the cards because we'd already used them and they
had no wish to call the Internet company to try and sort out things. We
tried connecting by using the Smartcards for 2 days without much success but
in the end we decided to consider the $60 as loss and bought time online
from one of the wireless networks that we could get in our room called
"Airlie_Beach_rooms" (I only wish we tried that first). Aside from the
lack of interest in solving our Internet problem, we had no problems with
the staff. They were not the friendliest but they were professional and
helped us with booking some tours. Make sure to try the resort's restaurant,
"Deja Vu", their food is amazing.