Mariam Abdeldayem

Review of Al Marwa Rayhaan by Rotana

I stayed at this hotel 6 years ago on my previous ...

I stayed at this hotel 6 years ago on my previous trip to the holy city and they were more than perfect. However, it seems that the quality of their service has only went down ever since. First thing firsts... we paid for a suite there and due to some issues with travel, we arrived late so we had no other option but that particular suite or a royal suite as everything else was booked. The suite smelled like urine.... like somebody has urinated over every piece of furniture there. All they did was try to fix it by "spraying some airfreshener" that lasted two seconds and "trying to turn up the AC" to get rid of the smell. But obviously none of that worked. We went to the reception and they claimed that by the time we are done with our prayers in the haram they'd have it fixed. 5 hours later. Room still smells like urine. So we complained and the receptionist came up to check it out, he claimed it wasn't "that bad"!!!!!! So we get the head of housekeeping to determine if it does smell bad or not and he sided with us! This is all because the hotel didn't want to give us a new room which would be a free upgrade to the Millennium suite.
Moving on.
Our flight was at 11 pm. Check out at 1. So we went to the reception and asked for an extension since my mom needs to rest. They made us pay 900 SR for an extension till 7 pm and then guess what! We found out that there is no such price after we left! Not only that! But also at 3 pm, we were kicked out because "the system said that you should have left by 3". After a long argument and a supposed apology, they gave us a new keycard and told us to come by after prayer at 7 pm max to gather our luggage and get going, we were fine with that.
We arrived at 6 30 after prayer and you guessed it... keycard did not work! And they insisted that we pay 2000 SR!!!!! As a fine for exceeding the check-out time limit at 7 pm.... all this was at 6 45 pm.... and after a long argument we were able to get our luggage without paying extra but the hotel staff where awful to us.
If I could, I'd give this supposed 5-star hotel zero stars... but I'm going to leave that one star there because the house-keeping boy was a sweetheart who did his job excellently in every way possible and was very much tip-worthy.