Our hotel experiences in Chiang Main and Chiang Rai provided excellent examples of how a hotel should be run, and also how to comprehensively fuck things up.
First Chiang Mai, and The Tamarind, located within the old city walls and, as previously reported, within walking distance of many temples and the Sunday night market. It also has a good coffee shop right across the road.
The hotel is in a walled compound with a tree lined entrance:
The rooms are built around a courtyard featuring a tamarind tree:
The rooms are not large, but they are consistent with the quaint charm of the place:
The breakfast had the she who must be obeyed seal of approval, and the dining area was a good place to sit in the evening for a nightcap:
The swimming pool featured an unusual tiled sky:
Service was discrete, efficient and friendly and it was just a pleasant place to stay. It was our second visit and we will stay there again next time we go to Chiang Mai.
Then to Chiang Rai, to the Phowadol Resort. Almost the same price as the Tamarind and touted as a 5 star resort. It isn’t.
The initial impression was good. Nicely landscaped and cute individual cottages. Then you go inside your cottage and find it is gloomy, with inadequate lighting and shitty wood everywhere painted in that diarrhea coloured orange varnish so beloved of Thai woodworkers looking for a cheap finish. The aircon sounds like a jet on final approach and there are wires hanging from broken fixtures. It’s the sort of room you don’t want to spent much time in.
We went out for a meal and came back for a drink at the bar. It was shut; at 2200. We asked at reception and were told that all the staff were helping at a seminar, or attending a seminar, or had been abducted by aliens. Whatever the reason, the staff at reception didn’t seem to care that we couldn’t have a drink. After all, we could always go back to our darkened room and enjoy the contents of our mini-bars (one beer, one water). Turns out we hadn’t missed much because we went to the bar the second night and it was crap. Some scrappy tables and chairs outside a scruffy room staffed by a young man more interested in the contents of his nose than serving us.
Breakfast was in a a room that could double as a waiting room in a hospital, complete with smells. The food supply appeared to have been pillaged by a marauding army, and what was left tasted like cardboard; and not that tasty cardboard you sometimes find as part of chocolate boxes.
The staff were disinterested to the point of rudeness. She who must be obeyed asked about restaurants in the vicinity (not wanting to eat roadkill in the hospital waiting room) and was told “about 3 kilometres away”; very helpful.
The Phowadol resort is an example of a place that could have been a 5 star hotel; but is a 2 star dump because the owners clearly don’t give a shit about running the place properly. Avoid. Oh, and I didn’t take any photos because it was all just too depressing.
Comments 🔗
2010-01-27| Antz saysAh, but did the Tamarind have luxury bathroom amenities? If not, they can’t be as good as you say…..
2010-01-28| Spike saysSo good, she who must be obeyed felt it would be wrong to steal them.
2010-01-28| Antz saysI’m sure there must be some logic in that….. somewhere….