Joanna Pogorzelska-Dyrbu

Review of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts,...

From a hotel of such class you automatically expec...

From a hotel of such class you automatically expect a remarkable, flawless stay. Unfortunately, this wasn t.
First of all: three times we had an issue with the safebox: at first it ran out of batterie At first it ran out of power, so we had a mechanician sent to our room to fix it, what somewhat disorganised our day whilst we had to ubexpectedly postpone all our activities scheduled for the next day. Second, accidentally we found an outrageous feature of the safe: it was completely freely movable on the shelf. Opening and closing the safe we hadn t discovered it, but I pushed the safebox a little and then hovered in the air. What a pity, now remembering having left almost all our money in the safebox that everyone could have taken away. Again, no big sorry for that. The next day, the safe got...out of power once we got back to the hotel late at night. Such a spate should not happen in the 5* hotel, if it was 2 stars, I wouldn t blame anyone.
Another issue was a sudden loss of electricity in the room at 11 pm. Just think of what a seven year-old child feels suddenly losing almost all the light in the room when she s falling asleep. Fortunately, the mechanician came 10 minutes later to fix it.
Another issue with the hotel staff was how they handled our request for organising a bouquet of flowers for a very special ocassion we had. Astonishingly, the reception assistant refused to help, claiming that we should purchase them ourselves in the city. Again, I ve been to hundreds of 5* hotels in dozens of cities across the globe, but I ve never been treated like this, having being left with utterly no help in such an ordinary thing (it was just the flowers, not a helicopter tour).
We also had an issue with the room key cards. Having already had encountered many similar issues with the cards we always place them separately from the mobile phones or any other electronic devices. The lady wasn t even sorry for what happened, completely startling us when we compare the attitude of the staff in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur or even in the European hotels.
Finally, guess what: by chance we met the hotel manager in the lift just after we couldn t have entered the room and the safe broke down again. He wasn t even really sorry for what happened, maybe because we were staying in the room on the lowest floor, not in the privileged high floors.
Anyway, we can t complain about the quality and cleanliness of the room, the qualities and quantities of the meals served in the restaurants or the general design and elegance of the hotel per se. It s just the way in which all our inconveniences were summarised without any sensation of feeling sorry or embarassment. Again, we couldn t have argued if all of those all in all minor disturbances occurred in any hotel, but it s the way they handled in, totally out of place for the 5* hotel described as embracing delightfully welcoming spirit of Thailand