Planning

Sometime before the arrival of my third child, I began to panic as the wall started to close in. I decided I needed something, anything to look forward to so I booked a vacation I wasn’t sure we would be able to take. My wife loves Paris so we chose to return to Paris. Wanting to couple that with something else, I mentioned Marrakech and my wife said “why? What’s there?” I responded Amanjena and she said “I’ll go anywhere there’s an Aman…”. So I reached out to DavidO to see if he could book it for me, given that It was over a year in advance and he was able to book the Winter Escape package at the current rates with a confirmed upgrade to a Pavillion Piscine from a Pavillion Basin… As we lovingly celebrated the birth of our third child and made it through the first couple of months, the trip seemed to be within grasp…After a nice week in Paris at the Park Hyatt we took a shortish flight to Marrakech

Check In

So apparently VIP fast track is only included in some of the Amanjena packages.. Nonetheless customs and immigration were quick and we were met by the Amanjena driver just outside of customs and escorted to the waiting BMW X5. Cold towels and cold water awaited us for the short drive. We arrived at Amandari and were greeted by the exec staff, including the GM Nick and resort manager Astrid. AFter introductions, Astrid took us around and showed us the resort and then to our room, where she finished check-in.

Room

Love the classic design of Ed Tuttle here. The Pavillion Piscine is a wonderful room. I've got nothing to argue here. We used the fireplace every night (though it seemed that the wood that they had needed to season a bit more). The pool was heated to a perfect 86 degrees and was absolutely amazing to spend time in. Breakfast both indoors and outdoors every morning. We spent a ton of time in the room and loved it. I've really got nothing bad to say about it... everything seemed to be well maintained, even though the resort is over 15 years old... A really quite nice floral arrangment as well.. I could see that if the occupancy was high that there could be spillover noise from adjacent pavillions (all the Pavillion Piscine's are next to each other)... not a ton of views but the walls afforded a great amount of privacy in the pool.... 

Dining

I have to say I wasn't crazy about the food. Much like most Amans it doesn't seem to be anything impressive. The Japanese restaurant was quite limited in their offerrings (ie like 4-5 different kind of fish) and didn't even seem to offer tamago, which seems like it would be pretty easy. Breakfast was solid- the Virtuoso offerring mentioned continental breakfast but Astrid said we could order whatever we wanted when I asked her what that meant... Food definitely was not a highlight here unfortunately... I did enjoy afternoon tea each day though!

Location

It's pretty much it's own little enclave, located outside the hustle and bustle of the old city. I get the feeling most of the resorts are like that. We were able to take bikes out and ride around the adjeacent community/golf course

Excursions

We did two. One was the standard old city tour; which was pretty standard... the guide unfortunately did attempt to take us to a carpet shop. Marrakech's old city is crazy and hectic and it was great to return to the calm serenity of Amanjena... the other trip was to a traditonal Berber town, with a stop at a village market on the way. That was really interesting because we also got to have lunch in a Berber house.

Spa/Fitness

The fitness area is pretty small, with just a couple machines. I stayed out of there and we just rode bikes for exercise. I didn't use the resort pool at all as it wasn't heated as warm as our private pool... we took a number of spa treatments, which were of high quality. The facilities themself are quite limited and strangely laid out (ie treatment rooms seem to connect). There are indeed plans for to construct a new spa (as well as a number of villas). Apparently there are some tennis courts as well...

Grounds

Loved them. It's a pretty compact resort but thoughtfully laid out by Ed Tuttle. 

Service

Service was very very good here, almost as good as a SE Aman. Nicholas is an excellent GM and would stop and talk with us every day. Astrid was wonderful as well and definitely deserves the promotion.. everyone we interacted with was great and knew our name. My wife really liked the terracota foot scrubbers that they had in the showers- we asked at the gift shop if they sold them, which they didn't. However, the gift shop manager called someone in housekeeping who brough us 3 to bring home, without any charge! Definitely a nice touch..We did have a bit of a quibble on our last day- they had a complete property buy-out arriving that day so it wasn't clear what time we would need to check out (our flight was at 5 PM I think). We were indeed cleared to checkout at 2 PM, which was great- however on our checkout day around 1130 AM we went back to our room and a whole squad was in there starting to clean... they apologized and left promptly... Astrid and Nicholas both apologized to us for the oversight, and gave us two leather Amanjena wallets, which I think was a nice service recovery..

Overall

Loved Amanjena. Would not hesitate to go back. Only strike really is that we don't really need to go back to Marrakech so will probably look elsewhere.. But definitely a classic Aman with classic Aman service.