Koray Hotel

The setting is peaceful and beautiful, with lovely sunsets. Koray Hotel also offers free rides downtown, which saves about $10 a day compared with regular public transport. The food was delicious and changed from day to day. There isn’t a huge selection, but that makes sense for the price. I’d recommend it, and the rate feels fair for what you get.

There was no Wi-Fi, and breakfast didn’t provide enough food for all the guests. Towels weren’t changed daily either. The staff did their best to help, but the hotel’s limited resources made things difficult.

The bed was wonderful, and the hotel is across the street from the sea, though you can’t swim there. It’s easy to catch a bus right outside. The air conditioning gets really cold if you want it to, and breakfast was great. I didn’t understand why they leave all the food on the table for guests to serve themselves, or why the pool closes so early, around 7 p.m. The shower swung between really hot and freezing, without staying steady. Still, I had a great stay.

The hotel is far from downtown and the swimmable beaches. You can see the ocean, but the nearby shore is rocky, not a beach. There’s a pool that’s nice enough, and a shuttle downtown at 8:30 a.m. that returns at 5. The driver was great, but the shuttle doesn’t run on Tuesdays. A dog at the neighboring property barked constantly, and we could hear it from our room all the time. There are a lot of rules and extra charges. Even with a prepaid package, we had to pay an additional “tax” per night at check-in. Each person gets one towel for both showering and the pool, with no extras, and there’s only one key per room even when several people are staying. Wi-Fi didn’t work in our room or many common areas. There was light coming through gaps in the door slats. Food and drinks are for sale, but they can’t make change for large bills. Breakfast and dinner were the same over and over. Since our tour package included both meals, we were stuck with them. There was no hot water in our room, not even lukewarm, so we had to get used to cold showers. The front desk attendant couldn’t tell us the taxi fare downtown. It turned out to be 25,000 pesos for a ride of less than five minutes, which is ridiculously expensive.