Recently completed 2 stays at Amanpuri and Amanwella. These were my first 2 stays with Aman and safe to say that they were also my last. Amanpuri was moderately bad, but great in comparison to Amanwella, which was abysmal.

Amanpuri

I booked a 2 night stay 3 days before checkin. At this point there were only Pavillon rooms (lowest room category) available. The booking was made via AMEX FHR. Entry level room were 1600usd per night at the time of booking including all taxes and fees.

The Pavillon rooms are at the road and for some reason they have a lot of motorised traffic in the resort including trucks. So sitting on the deck, you get the feeling that you are in a highway motel.

After pointing this out to them they did move us to a garden pavilion after some back and forth. Our FHR rate included an upgrade to the next category and their website showed that at least two garden pavilions were available on the day of check-in. However, upon check-in they denied that they had rooms available which I found rather odd given that I could have just booked one.

The garden pavilion rooms are significantly better in terms of ambiance and noise from the road. Rooms are quite close together though and not as private as I would have liked.

The interior is identical in all pavilion rooms. Rooms are definitely showing their age inside. This becomes most apparent when looking at their (or rather lack of) insulation. Lots of small gaps between doors through which heat and insects come in. Our pavilion had a little ant trail to the minibar. The other bit is the general layout which seems dated, no sofa or sitting space for 2 people. And the rooms have that distinctive old-room-in-a-tropical-country smell.

I absolutely hate the Aman bed, it is rock hard and I get backpain thinking about the nights there. I did have a topper added after the first night which makes it slightly better but still not a great bed, I have slept better in some random airbnbs.

The resort shows its age in other regards too. During the first night there was a thunderstorm which knocked out the AC (not the power interestingly), I don’t think that this would have happened with more modern infrastructure. The AC remained off for most of the next day or even longer (not sure until when exactly). The way this was handled was absolute chaos. There was no apology, not even a fan was offered, they suggested we could hang in the library which had AC. Aha, thanks.

At one point I had enough. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about another sleepless night at 36C and told them that I’d be leaving now and would move to a different hotel. They then decided to move us to a villa with functioning AC instead. So we ended up with a single bedroom of a 4 bedroom villa. The villas are beautiful in general, with great landscaping. The interiors of the villas, however, aren’t. They must have had the original 1989 interior, with an AC that was dripping and made the cabin of an old 777 appear silent. It was also insufficient to cool the room during the day. The AC isn’t the only old appliance in the villa, pretty much everything is, the hairdryer barely worked, etc.

So generally, the hard product in pavilions and particularly in the villas is just not adequate anymore. They should close the resort, properly insulate the rooms, and redo all the interiors. I don’t mean a touch-up, I mean rip it all out and replace everything.

While I was disappointed in the hard product the soft product was the real letdown. The GM was nowhere to be seen. Especially after the AC disaster I would have assumed that at least some manager would have made the rounds at breakfast or during afternoon tea.

I would describe the staff as awkward and incompetent. For example, upon checkout I asked via whatsapp to have our rental car brought up to reception (they had parked it somewhere). I would usually expect that this wouldn’t be necessary, but the impression they had left made me believe that it would be better to ask for it. Upon arriving at reception the car wasn’t there, instead the receptionist asked us if they should arrange transportation. I said no, please bring our rental car, it’s presumably parked in your parking lot. They then dialled a number and I then watched them with some bewilderment adding 1900 thb to the bill with a pen. They then explained that this is for the taxi that they had just called :facepalm:

Interactions were consistently strange and I won’t bore everyone by listing every single interaction but here are some highlights: On the first night we were sitting by the beach watching the sunset. When we were walking back up the stairs a security man came running after us yelling “room number, room number”. Or upon checkin when I asked if they had other rooms available the receptionist told us they would check and then just stared at me. Or a manager of sorts offering to drive us to the room, but then got lost and insisted we were in a different room and didn’t really want to believe the room number I gave them. They finally gave in but dropped us at the wrong villa. Well done!

I recall reading a post on flyertalk by someone who was terribly upset that they had to sign a bill in a restaurant. I consistently had to sign bills and give my room number, maybe I have a very unmemorable face.

Food is okay, but rather on the weaker side with lots of hick-ups. For example I asked to remove the sugar from the vinaigrette in a salad, what I got was a salad without any sauce consisting of cucumber, avocado, and tomato. They decided to send some guacamole on the side as a sauce. So I ended up eating avocado with avocado sauce. I do like avocado, so not a total loss.

On the second night we ordered food to the villa for 7:30pm. At 7:50pm I got a message asking if we had received any food (which we hadn’t at this point). Around 10 minutes later we did receive some lukewarm food which had clearly been sitting around for some time. Delicious.

So in conclusion, I wouldn’t recommend puri. Maybe some of the issues were bad luck, but others like the poor hardware certainly weren’t.

Amanwella

Only twice in my life have I checked out of a hotel prematurely because I didn’t like it. One time was a terribly run down tourist hotel in Cyprus where I was literally greeted by an entirely naked and drunk occupant of the hotel, the other time was the Amanwella (not counting the Amanpuri, where I tried unsuccessfully a few weeks prior).

Maybe I was still upset about the puri experience. Having been in Sri Lanka countless times, I was quite surprised about how bad the whole experience was. We again booked via Amex FHR, 2 rooms one for my wife and myself, the other for my mother-in-law. Both rooms were booked in the base room category and were upgraded to their ocean view room (the kind where your don’t face the road) which I think was a 2 category upgrade. That’s were the good part ends.

When checking in I half jokingly asked if the rooms had AC, still traumatised from puri. The manager, somewhat concerned, said they had “mild AC”. He wasn’t lying. There was mild AC during the night and running the AC on full power mildly cooled the room. The same cannot be said during the day. The problem was once again insufficient insulation of the room and a single old AC unit for a too large room. The poorly sealed room also led to lots of ants and insects in the room. Don’t leave any food around. They will find it. The toilet is entirely without AC and features a huge glass wall, so that you end up in a sauna. The shower was just open to the outside, no window…

Another feature of the poor insulation was that you could hear everything happening outside. If you are facing one of the internal roads you can indulge in the sounds of the motorized tuck tuck’s. If you have one of the ocean facing ones, you hear them somewhat less, mostly because the sound is drowned out by the waves at the beach. I realize that this is an odd thing to say but the sound of waves was incredibly loud inside the room despite windows and doors being closed. It’s not a gentle sound of waves that break on the beach. It’s the rather violent sound of waves smashing into rocks, and there is no escape because the single glazed door features a 1-2cm gap above and below it. I’m not a light sleeper but woke up numerous times at night.

The remainder often the hardware is nothing to write home about either. The Aman bed is still rock hard, the private pools have the charm of a prison yard. There is no landscaping. And the beach is a public (and easy to access) one where countless businesses set up right against the fence of the Aman. There is no gym in Wella, and they ridiculed me for even asking.

Food was some of the worst I ever had in Sri Lanka. Maybe their western food options are better, but I didn’t try those. I think nothing tops our checkout experience though. After we had enough of the malfunctioning AC and bugs we decided to go to the nearby Anantara. I asked the hotel if they could arrange transportation for which they charged 50 usd (it’s quite literally a 10 minute ride). They explained me that this is just the way things are in Sri Lanka and that transportation is expensive. There is some truth to this, but 50usd is absolutely outrageous for a 10 minute ride. Anyway, I accepted assuming I would receive a decent hotel car that would be waiting for me at the agreed time. Of course, no car was there. And when a car showed up some 15 minutes late it was a rundown smelly van with no AC that had been parked in the full sun for a few hours before.

I’m at a loss of words about this property. None of the above is okay. Maybe you read this and think, well he clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about, there are insects in tropical countries, AC can be problematic, waves are loud, or something similar. Don’t say I didn’t warn you though.