mymiles2go

Red carpet still here for Diamonds, black carpet otherwise - both say Hilton HHonors.

The gift last night was a nice little local spice kit, kinda neat.

The reality is that at this particular resort, there's really not a lot of reason to add more differentiation for Diamond - they're already giving more than I can count on free things. While I see the point that gold's could get less, the only thing one could get is a better villa location (for Diamond's).

And in my very informal survey of carpets - Diamond's did get better villa locations - though realistically almost all of them are surprisingly nice.

As a side note, I continue to be amazed at the food here. We spent the previous 5 days at Denis Private Island (here in the Seychelles), and were heavily disappointed in many ways (considering it's far more expensive than the Hilton).

nimenime

We're going back to Northolme for the second time in March, this time in the oceanfront villas

The hotel grounds are very nice!

nimenime

We made the mistake of coming back to Northolme, thinking they had improved since last year. Sadly and incredibly enough, the hotel seems strongly committed to providing sub-par service. Booked two villas, one for me, wife and kid, the other for my sister. In advance, we had requested an early check-in at 12 noon. This was not available, which is OK, so we came back at 1400, only to be told our villas were not available at the moment, but we could sit and have lunch in the bar. No further information was given, so at 1530 we asked the bar staff when our villas would be ready, to which they replied they would be ready at 1800. OK, a hotel can make mistakes, but at least the hotel should take care to inform their guests at timely intervals.

We then went to the reception to ask why they were not ready until then. The reception staff then replied that one of the villas had been ready since check-in at 1400, and all our luggage (incl my sister's luggage meant for the other villa) had been brought there. We then received the keycards for the one villa that had been ready, one and a half hour after checking in. The other villa for my sister would not be ready until 1800, and she would be compensated with a 20 min massage in the spa for the inconvenience. She was not interested in getting a massage, only access to her villa, as she wanted to freshen up after traveling from Praslin, relax in her villa, and use the pool, beach etc.

We went to the reception again to inform them that this was not a good start for our stay, and suggested that a dinner discount would be acceptable as compensation for the long delay. Not so for the staff, who insisted that the lunch we had been served cost in excess of €200 (the total amount came to about SCR 1000 ~ €40), and that we could expect no more from them. Needless to say, we ate dinner elsewhere, and will never again return to Northolme - which is a shame, since the hotel itself is absolutely beautiful.

Just now we got a call from the reception at Northolme (we are now in an other hotel) and they offered nothing but an apology (since we have received a free lunch - well, we paid dearly for it by not having our villas available) and hoped we would be back for a third visit.

Someone in the management must be extremely short-sighted to believe we will return. Maybe we are just unlucky, but our experience with this hotel is absolutely not good at all. The service and staff commitment is clearly non-existent, to be honest, we've stayed i B&B's which have had far superior service. On the other hand, Hilton's junior staff, such as the gate guards, ground keepers etc, which are all very friendly and attentive.

A review will of course also be posted on Tripadvisor.

Thunderroad

Very sorry to hear about your disappointing check-in experience, nimenime, especially since this is a property I've been interested in. Are you saying that you didn't even stay there, and that you moved over to another hotel immediately when your sister's room was delayed? If you did stay there longer than an afternoon, how was the place beyond your initial bad experience?

nimenime

No, we stayed one night, then moved on to another hotel - a whole different experience in service level!

The Hilton Northolme is a beautiful, magnificent hotel, but sadly lacks attention to the soft product - I also forgot to mention that the breakfast was horrible this time. Not Hilton standard at all. Had the management just spent a little energy on getting that in order, I'd be back in a heartbeat. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, but we tried it a second time and regret it. There are plenty of other hotels in the Seychelles that do it far better than Hilton.

belynch

Just made a reservation for 7 nights in August and was shocked to see the "points price" dropped from 50k/night to 37,5.

I haven't been following Hilton, FT (or the other site) for the past few weeks - was a price drop announced or did the hotel reposition with the opening of the Labriz property?

As a total aside the new hilton.com is just as sucktastic as the old. A hillside villa was 37,5 points/night while an oceanfront was 1,200,000 or something obviously incredibly wrong. I think the site had to send off to NASA to calculate points for the Ian Flemming suite.

markmde

Most likely, you have now a VIP reward where the points per night is slightly lower than with the standard reward. For example, even the Conrad Maldives is for a 10 day stay available for 375k in total (making again 37,5k/night).

Me personally, I would never spend more points for an upgrade. As I was there, I got an upgrade to a very nice beach villa for free (being Diamond).

seychellesbound

deleted......I always thought it was NorthLome? Excuse my dyslexia

sailanacra

I have booked 6 nights here in November for my honeymoon. It was 37.5k points per night with the VIP discount for a hillside. I would really like an oceanfront room but to book with points was 270,000 points per night or something totally crazy. I was wondering what people's success in getting an upgrade offseason as a Diamond. Should I contact the manager an offer to pay a little more for the upgrade?

On another note, for the same number of points I could stay 4 nights at Northlome and 2 nights at the new Hilton (Labriz) on the other island. Has anyone been there and would it be worth the extra time to take a ferry to the other island ?

Thanks!

Sail a Nacra

ma91pmh

I just got back from 5 days in Seychelles where we stayed at the Starwood Meridien Fisherman's Cove but I thought I would post some feedback here as we went for one dive and they took us to Northolme Rocks which is a small rock formation coming out of the water just in front of this hotel. August is the worst possible time for diving due to strong tradewinds causing rough sea so visibility was not great but it was a good dive none the less. We saw 5 Stonefish and 4 Lionfish. I have to say the Hilton property looked very, very nice. Though it was funny as we passed by pretty close and could see people getting treatments in the spa!

I would likely stay at this property the only problem seems to be they don't have any rooms that would sleep 2 adults and 2 under aged 12 kids. It's a real pain to get two rooms when the kids are two young in our view to be left alone in their own room. Seems all the rooms here are 2 adults only. The Labriz across the sea on Silhouette caters for families well it seems.

For divers the key to a good trip here is going the right time of the year. If you go in September or October the sea will be calmer and visibility better and the Whale Sharks will be in full swing. In fact we saw one on a fishing trip and it was wonderful and I was itching to dive in and swim with it but with waves hitting 3-4m it was too dangerous. They have already arrived in the waters just round the corner from Beau Vallon but in a few weeks time the calmer waters will make snorkeling and diving with them easy. Also April seems to be another period of calmer, warmer water with high visibility. Go in any of these 3 months and you are likely to get an experience to rival the Maldives.

belynch

Got back from Africa last night, including the 7 nights at the Northolme. Really mixed feelings about this hotel.

We arrived on the HM flight from MRU, which was about 30 min. behind schedule. Didn't make it to the property until 9pm and the check-in villa was deserted. The security guy called down to the front-desk and someone sauntered up, about 5 minutes later, seemingly inconvenienced. No welcome drink or anything offered. Check-in was very business like and not the customary resort greeting.

First villa smelled like the Marlboro man had just checked-out. My wife and I both have asthma and staying in that room, in addition to smelling terrible, would have caused us to be very uncomfortable. The reception person agreed that the smell of smoke was very profound for a "non-smoking room" and came back to tell us she was able to get us a new villa, but just for the night. So, they moved us.

By the time we got everything situated it was about 10:30 and we were very hungry as we hadn't eaten supper. Unfortunately the kitchen closes at 10p and it took an act on Congress to get them to make us a Club sandwich.

The next day we were moved to a new villa, right next to the reception area. Probably the worst villa on the property from a noise perspective. Every morning at 6am the tour vans idle right outside this room. Really disappointed with that and I don't understand why they insisted on moving us again to this villa.

In all three of the villas we saw the inside of while they looked clean at first pass, they really weren't. I don't think the villa we stayed in for the last 6 days had seen a mop in months. I walked out of the shower one day and stepped on the floor and then onto a bath mat. You could see a perfect black print of my foot on the towel (I'll post a picture later). That's how dirty the floors were. We mentioned this to the front desk and they said they'd send someone to clean our floors and someone came up and swept (which isn't what we were asking for). We showed the housekeeping person how dirty the floor was using the water and towel method and she shrugged.

Also had trouble with our keys continually becoming decoded. For the first four days we'd have to get our key recoded 3x / day. I finally told them to either fix the lock or station someone with a key coder outside our villa because I was done wasting 10 minutes every time we wanted to get back into our room. They finally dispatched maintenance, who fixed it. Not sure why they couldn't have fixed it the other, no joke, dozen times we asked.

Despite all that service overall was actually pretty good. The food was just okay. Breakfast was pretty weak but wasn't bad. The dinner buffet was, of course, outrageously overpriced -- we went on the Indian night -- and we enjoyed it. The "fine dining" restaurant was really disappointing from a food quality perspective. Service, however, was great.

Because of the location of the hotel they more or less have you captive for meals and it's surprising that they don't have more of a selection for on-property F+B options. We ate one night down in Beau Vallon, which was okay and another night at the Bliss Hotel / Lounge 8, which was a great experience.

The hotel gym was absolutely disgusting and the machines were pretty out-dated. I cleaned a mat before doing push-ups and was probably the first person to clean that mat in months. The floors, like the guest rooms, were also very dirty. I mentioned this to the front-desk and nothing was done about it. In the week we stayed I used the gym 6 times and it was never once cleaned (towels were refreshed though so they know it exists...).

The beaches are very small, but the location of the hotel on a little peninsula is very nice. Snorkeling on the house reef is pretty good, although there's a lot of dead reef. In our opinion, the reef did not compare, at all, with the house reef at the Conrad Maldives. House kayaks were nice and the house snorkeling equipment was in decent shape. Also took advantage of the house bicycles and cruised around Mahe for a day and stopped at a few beaches, which was nice (but hilly).

The Seychelles were nice and we're glad we made the trip, but not sure we'd return. It's a bit too far to travel from the U.S. for a beach location and although really beautiful, didn't compare with the Maldives (we did the day trip to La Digue and Praslin, which was nice). If we go back we'd do one of the Starwood properties that are a little better located, to give us more flexibility and probably stay on La Digue for a couple nights too. The day trip was too rushed.

As far as on-property Diamond benefits at the Northolme, we received breakfast and free internet (which was terribly slow). No better location for our villa (and no carpet of any color). I think there was some welcome stuff we were supposed to get, but because of the room shuffles those never found our way to us.

At check-out they tried to charge us resort fees, which were included in our points rate. They manually adjusted it without issue, but keep an eye on your folio if you stay on points. It's aggravating to me when hotels try and pull that nonsense.

Overall the hotel was a decent value from a discounted points perspective. Is it worth the 300 Euro / night rate (which seems to be the cheapest rate they offer for their Hillside villas)? Absolutely not.

If they fixed their F+B options, deep a really deep cleaning, and compensated for their lack of on-property F+B selections (maybe offer some sort of Concierge service for restaurants) the property could be a destination worth recommending.

Feel free to ping me with any questions.

seychellesbound

Wow....this is really a disappointing report. My dream honeymoon and FT handle have just taken a severe hit. I'm hoping the new Labriz Hilton will live up to its 5 star billing.

Was occupancy that high that an ocean villa was not available for your entire stay?

belynch

Infinity Pool


Looking out at the spa


Exterior of villas


Bed made-up for arrival


Put some water on a hand towel and wiped floor. This much dirt came up with one "pass." Kind of hard to see in the photo, but you can see the small area that I "cleaned." In the top right of the photo you can see how dirty the floor is.



Footprint on bathmat after taking one step on floor with wet foot after shower. The dirt is from the floor.

ma91pmh

belynch thanks for posting... the pictures of the dirt on the floor are truly shocking and i hope you send to the management of the resort so they can do something about it... that truly is gross

we stayed recently at the meridien fishermans cove on the other side of beau vallon i would not highly recommend that one either. we also dropped by the meridien barbaron and that place looked truly dire. maybe the labriz on silouhette island across the sea is the best option

belynch

They really couldn't be bothered to do anything about it while we were there (when it mattered) so I'm not sure it's worth my time or effort to pursue it. I haven't called Guest Assistance because, based on previous experiences, I have zero faith that they're capable of doing anything. I did fill out the post stay survey, so they have some data points.

And, at this point, the last thing I need or want, is to stay at another Hilton. I doubt I'll even use the couple hundred thousand points sitting in my account, let alone a BOG chit, which is probably what I'd get out of the condition of the Northolme.

After a solid year of far more misses than hits with Hilton affiliated properties I can see a pretty clear trend that I can't rely on their properties meeting my basics needs of being clean, quiet, and comfortable (and their loyalty program isn't really anything great).

Regarding Labriz -- I'd hope the hotel is in better shape than the Northolme, seeing as it was recently renovated during the conversion to a Hilton flagged property. The challenge with that hotel is that you're truly resort captive. Haven't been over there though, so not sure if it's worth it or not.