Caravelle Hotel & Casino

The Hotel

The Caravelle Hotel sits at 44A Queen Cross Street in central Christiansted, three doors back from the working boardwalk, opposite the Government House, and directly above the U.S. Virgin Islands' only casino. The property has been in continuous operation as a hotel since the late 1960s; the building itself is a five-storey mid-century structure painted in the soft yellow that has been the Caravelle identity since the conversion to a casino hotel in the 1990s. The full top-to-bottom 2019 renovation took the rooms, the lobby, the casino floor and the waterfront restaurant down to the studs and rebuilt them, the property today is materially the best three-star room product in central Christiansted, and the most central address on the island.

The 43 rooms are spread across four floors and split between the harbor-view rooms on the seaward side (the working booking, sunset over the harbor and the cay, the schooners and Hotel on the Cay's ferry visible from the balcony) and the town-view rooms on the inland side (cheaper, a quieter sleep). Every room runs at roughly 340 square feet with a king or two queens, a 42-inch flat-screen with the proper US cable package, a coffee setup, a small fridge, an iron and board, a safe, the brand-standard urban-hotel kit, executed with the bedding-and-bathroom upgrade that the 2019 renovation delivered. The bathrooms are walk-in showers (no tubs), the air conditioning is contemporary and quiet, and the soundproofing from the street is unusually good for a building of this age.

The reason to book is the geography. The Christiansted boardwalk runs from the lobby door, west along the waterfront past the schooner docks and the Christiansted Wharf, past the Caribbean dive operators (Cane Bay Dive Shop, St. Croix Ultimate Bluewater Adventures, the boats that run the Buck Island half-day) and on to King Street where the boardwalk's restaurants and bars are. Walking is the configuration: dinner at Savant or Zion Modern Kitchen is a four-minute walk, the dive-boat departure is a six-minute walk, the Hotel on the Cay ferry is a three-minute walk if you want to spend a beach day on Protestant Cay, and Henry E. Rohlsen airport is a 25-minute taxi. The casino on the ground floor is the only one in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the central evening venue for many guests; the live music programme runs five nights a week.

Dining is the on-property RumRunners, a waterfront restaurant on the boardwalk side of the building, open-air, breakfast through late-night, with the most reliable rum-list-and-fish kitchen on the boardwalk. The cooking runs to fresh local-catch fish, conch fritters, jerk chicken, a proper burger, and an ambitious rum-cocktail programme worked out with the on-island Cruzan distillery. Most guests use the property as a base, RumRunners for breakfast and the casual evening meal, the boardwalk dining (Savant, Zion, Polly's, the Mahogany Cafe) for the planned dinners, and the casino for the late-evening drink. Service is unfussy and proper urban-hotel: 24-hour front desk, on-call concierge, daily housekeeping, and the staff retention that the 2019 ownership change brought in to stabilise.

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