To complete my previous short review.
Two obvious things - Mandapa is stunning and the local crew amazing.
Now to our not so great experience.
I originally booked a rice fields villa (which ended up being the best choice).
But read some stupid reports on the TA forum that the rice villas
have no privacy etc. Tried to get in touch with the resort to get a very precise
explanation. Their first failure - email communication. They did respond,
but without any effort to help me really understand pros and cons.
Overall I have an impression the resort is proud to "be number 1 on TA"
and they feel like they can do no wrong.
Anyway I changed my booking to a fully prepaid one for the jungle villa (bad choice).
I also sent a few emails about our specific requests, very important to us.
Nothing out-of-this-world fancy, but health related mostly.
We pre-booked the “VIP” treatment to avoid any lines at Bali airport.
That worked perfect. After 5 minutes we were in the arrival hall trying to find
our driver. Next failure - they sent a regular taxi and the guy had
the smallest sign he could make. In a crowd of hundreds of signs (those
who have been to Bali know what I'm talking about), it was impossible to spot.
We spent 30 minutes trying to find the guy including paging him etc.
It was enough to simply make a sign 10 times larger.
Next - Friday night, he told us it would be 1 hour to the resort
(his English was not good). We also had some boiling (!) water waiting in his car.
Unfortunately it was a 2 1/2 hour drive, the worst we have ever experienced.
I'm not blaming him for the traffic, but he could prepare us for it,
rather than us keeping guessing every 10 minutes how much longer we have
to survive this. It was terrible, after an amazing Garuda NRT-DPS flight
it almost killed us, no kidding.
Arrived to the resort, pitch black everywhere, can't see anything.
A lady is there to "show us around". Are you kidding me? Show us what?
The driver called ahead we were coming, still we had to sit and wait for
a butler to take us to our room.
Our butler was the most useless we have ever met BTW. He took us
to the villa and we found out they gave us the worst one in the resort,
next to the main building and the entrance, with no light, no view, nothing.
As we discovered later, the resort was empty, but they made no effort
to give us something nicer. In addition to this they made no preparations
we specifically asked for, absolutely none. The villa was hot, there was
no cold water, after the exhausting drive from hell, I was very close
to call it done and move to a different hotel.
At this moment our “butler” is asking for my credit card to charge me…
the full amount for the stay. Remember, it was a fully pre-paid booking.
Acting like I’m wrong, but he’s gonna “wait till the morning because we are tired”.
Called the front desk, asked for a manager. An engineer shows up
to "fix AC". Ok, that's enough. Finally the same lady shows up and starts
apologizing. They are gonna move us to a nicer villa, working on AC
"right now" etc. Pitch black around, no cold water to drink...
They finally offered us water and a dinner.
The worst in this whole situation was our feeling they thought we just made up
some non-existing problems. They were nice, but never really apologized for anything,
they never really asked how to avoid this in the future. No manager came to ask
about the experience. They acted like "did you manage to relax a bit?".
When we left nobody bothered to show up. We were taken to the main entrance
where our personal driver waited (I obviously didn’t trust their taxis anymore).
No manager showed up to say bye. We never met any managers during our stay anyway.
It was like they were happy we were leaving. Very strange.
That was in strong contrast to the amazing local crew. The housekeeping was
outstanding, we donated them some of our items, they were very happy.
The restaurant service was great.
For next few days we moved to The Chedi Club and it was such a striking difference.
The GM was there to meet us and our personal butler was the most amazing.
The chef at Chedi called Mandapa personally to ask about our food allergies (!).
It’s obvious it’s possible to deliver great overall experience in Bali
