My nine-year-old daughter summed up the main problem with the Cove Atlantis, the newest addition to the Atlantis resort. “The supposedly magnificent rides and service is not so magnificent after all,” she said on our last day. I had decided to take her and her seven-year-old brother for a three-day end-of-school celebration. They had been hearing about Atlantis from their friends and cousins for years. From a marketing perspective, the resort, on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, has pulled off a brilliant campaign; in existence since 1994, it has become as mandatory a childhood rite of passage as a pilgrimage to Disney World. Its mile-long river of a pool that you ride in inflated inner tubes, choosing wild rapids along the way if you like, and sixty-foot-high see-through waterslides that shoot you through to pass through a tank of sharks, are the stuff of playground legend. The company that runs Atlantis recently unveiled Aquaventure, a new sixty-three-acre water space, making the resort the largest water-theme park in the world. An entire Mary-Kate and Ashley movie was even filmed there.

Bottom line: high expectations from the kids.

Last year, the company announced that it would open a luxury resort, the Cove, on the grounds, to appeal to high-end families. Management was undoubtedly aware of the frequent arguments that rage between parents, who would rather stay at the sister property, the One & Only Ocean Club, and their children, who feel “totally out of the action” if they have to take a shuttle over to Atlantis. Of course, when I was growing up these disagreements wouldn’t have taken place, because kids were lucky if they went along on their parents’ vacations. Today, however, kids as young as seven have a major say in where the family goes, so hotels that want to appeal to this segment of travelers had better try to please both parties. The Cove is Atlantis’s compromise, one that company reps insist, allows parents to get Ocean Club service and stylish comfort but with the proximity to pools and facilities that the kids crave. Cove guests are promised a private beach and pool areas (the adults-only one is affiliated with the Cain nightclub brand); gourmet dining options, including a Mesa Grill outpost from Bobby Flay; super service; and even an exclusive boutique, the first from Vivre catalog founder Eva Jeanbart-Lorenzotti.

Bottom line: different but equally high expectations from the parents.

Unfortunately, my children and I were only in the hotel a few minutes before we encountered a reality quite different from the marketing materials. The images in the ads and on the Web site show a low-rise structure with views out to the sea and a suite that seems to open straight onto the beach, giving the impression that, like the Ocean Club, this is an intimate resort of comparatively small buildings. The lobby unit, which houses the reception areas and three restaurants, is the one in the photographs. However, the 600-some rooms are located in a twenty-two-story tower that looks very similar to the other Atlantis towers and and kind of hotel towers in Las Vegas. Once we had checked in, we were told to head to the bellman’s stand, to be escorted to our room. At the sight of our wheelie bags, though, the white-uniformed staffer said, “You look like you don’t need help. Just take a right and another right to the tower.” Unfortunately, once we got up to the 17th floor, our electronic key card didn’t work. A housekeeper working on the hall let us into our room with his key, but when I asked how to get a working card, he said that we’d have to go back to the lobby. If we’d had a bellman with us, I assume he would have offered to replace our duds. He might also have explained the basic layout of the resort and such rituals as the plastic wristbands that all guests must wear to access the pools.

We eventually found our way to the complex of Atlantis pools, where, upon showing our room key to a woman in the pool hut, we received Atlantis wristbands. We did have a ball riding inner tubes along the lazy river and rapids, but after a few hours, the kids wanted to return to the quieter Cove pool. A security guard there who spotted our Atlantis bands stopped us. “I am sorry,” he said “this is only for hotel guests.” I showed him our room key, and he explained that we needed Cove wristbands, not Atlantis ones.

To get new keys so we could go back to our rooms, we had to wait in the lobby a good fifteen minutes behind three groups of people checking in. “Are you sure these will work?” I asked. “Because it’s a long way back here, and I can’t leave the kids.” She insisted that they would, not offering to send anyone along, just in case. Alas, these, too, were duds. Spotting a phone by the elevators on the floor, I asked to be connected to the front desk and instead reached a recording announcing that the extension was not in service. I stopped at the concierge desk at the bottom of the tower to see if anyone there could help. Next to me, a man was complaining that he had been waiting for his room for three hours. He’d been told it was being cleaned only to learn that it, in fact, a maid still hadn’t even begun. He had three small kids and had flown five hours. One of the women from the concierge desk did accompany us this time and got the key to work ONCE. Finally, after another visit to the lobby, a locksmith was sent who fixed our lock. Total time spent on key issue: approximately forty minutes, and this is a $500-a-night room.

“We’ve tried this, but we’re going back to the Royal Towers over Christmas,” a veteran visiting mom told me by the pool. “It’s more kid-friendly. I can get a better layout and more space, and it’s closer to the restaurants where we eat.” That night, I learned why she didn’t eat at the Cove. We ordered room service for dinner: two pastas (from the kids’ menu), two chocolate-chip cookies, a turkey wrap and a fruit plate cost $103.30. The next day I decided to try out the bill preview on the TV and learned that we had also racked up $110 on the minibar. When I called downstairs to dispute the sum—even with built-in gratuities, there was no way that two Fiji waters and a cranberry juice could cost that much—I was told that every time the fridge was opened the sensor added charges to the bill. And, yes, if you put my son in a room with a fridge stocked with soda and candy, he’s going to open it and ask, even if he knows he probably will be told no. “But if you expect kids in the room, why wouldn’t you put a sign somewhere or put a lock on the fridge?” I asked. “That’s not how the system works,” the woman on the phone replied.

We continued to have service issues the next few days, and the whole experience reminded me of the early days when Las Vegas was trying to become a luxury destination. The room had attractive contemporary wood furniture, two expensive plasma-screen TVs (one a miniature movie screen), a beautiful marble bathroom with lovely Red Flower soaps and lotions. But expensive trappings without an integrated luxury experience just exacerbates the disappointment when what you believed you were promised is not delivered.

A symbol of this disjunction was the exquisite Escape by Vivre, located between the lobby and the tower. (See Style: Vivre in 3-D.) The beautifully styled boutique offers a fabulous selection of accessories, clothing and housewares, including some knockout beaded and embroidered caftans, some costing more than $1,000. There are intricate slippers from Oscar de la Renta, Loro Piana sweaters, Castaner wedges, alligator carryalls, coral necklaces and esoteric fragrances from France. In a fantasy sort of dressing-room space, surrounded by rows of artfully stocked wooden shelves and glass cases of jewelry, men and women can easily outfit themselves as elegant resortgoers fit for St. Bart’s or St.-Tropez. Black-and-white photos on the wall show glamorous vacationers from the 1960s, and yet Cove guests must wear tacky nightclublike wristbands. If we didn’t, we were stopped by security guards. This seemed to encapsulate all of what’s wrong with the Cove. As a friend who went over spring break with her kids wrote me in an email, “It is perfect as a theme-park vacation with the kids (sans husband) for no longer than a weekend! But I think the fact that they are marketing it as separate and different from Atlantis is misleading, as it is really just the newest (I guess most upscale) of the Atlantis Towers.”

Of course, as water-theme parks go, Atlantis is pretty great. The aquarium contains more than 50,000 reef fish in 20 million gallons of water, from parrotfish, French angelfish, coral tuna and spiny lobsters to sharks and rays, and is cleverly arranged so you can walk through glass-walled rooms, viewing the underwater environment from many angles as though you were walking on the ocean floor. Aquaventure, which opened this spring, encompasses various water rides, pools and slides, including the Power Tower and the Abyss, a fifty-foot near-vertical drop. A number of the slides and conveyor belts weren’t working when we visited, so the claim that “guests never have to leave the water” wasn’t quite accurate, but we didn’t mind carrying our tubes up some stairs for the thrill of the ride down. Everyone shooting the rapids and riding wave surges—from little kids to teenagers, college partiers and adult gamblers—had smiles plastered on their faces. We jumped in over and over again, but by the third day, we were all ready to go home. Double room rates in high season from $735.

Tips: —If you go, bear in mind that although the Cove is a step up from the Royal Towers, it’s no secluded island retreat. You’re there for the kids or for the gambling. Many college students go to party, and friends who stayed over spring break were repeatedly awakened in the middle of the night by rowdy teens.

—Request VIP meet-and-greet service; it’s not guaranteed, nor can be purchased, but if you are treated to it, you can avoid the long check-in lines.

—Pack a waterproof bag of some sort to carry your camera, room key and phone in, because there are no lockers by the pool where you can leave things when you are on the water rides—and you will get drenched.

—Stake out a chaise early in the day. The ones by the Mayan pool are “toweled” quickest, because it’s most central to the areas of attraction.

—Prepare your kids for the possibility of getting separated. Agree on a meeting point. Make sure they know their room number and your cell-phone number. Unless you ride a raft together, you can lose sight of each other in the pools, so have a plan.

—If you want to meet the dolphins, reserve early, since slots go quickly. The charge is $150 a person, and children must be accompanied by an adult. If you would like to swim with the dolphins, you will have to go off the property, as the ones here were rescued after Katrina and have not yet been habituated to guests.

—Make restaurant reservations before you arrive if you want to eat in the better ones, like Nobu or Mesa Grill.

—The best rainy-day activities are movies in the Atlantis Theatre, the Dig aquarium (but go early) and the game room, called Gamer’s Reef, and Club Rush at the Beach Tower.

—Be aware that gourmet fare is really only offered at dinner time. Lunch by the pool is the same at the Cove as at the Atlantis: premade wraps, burgers, hot dogs and French fries.

—And gourmet dining comes at a high price. Even the buffet restaurant at the Cove, Mosaic, charges $20 a child under ten, $50 an adult, and tacks on a 15 percent gratuity. No wonder that the repeat mom by the pool told me she hops the shuttle to Marina Village most nights to eat at Johnny Rockets.

—If you are a large family traveling with small kids—ones too young to be left in a room alone overnight—you may want to consider the suites in the Royal Tower, for more space and layout flexibility.

—Don’t expect to get a late checkout time. Even though the hotel wasn’t full when I was there, this service was not available. I asked if we could stay until noon but was told that each hour past 11:00 would cost $150. The resort does, however, have a transit lounge with lockers and showers.

We’d love to hear from other members about their Atlantis experiences. Please add your comments or your tips.