Hotel Flower Garden

The location is great, near the beach, restaurants and shops, and the rooms were spacious. But this was easily the worst hotel of my two weeks in Sri Lanka, and absolutely not worth 70 USD a night. Maybe 30 USD at most. We booked a deluxe double through Agoda, which advertised a garden view. Instead, we got a first-floor room with no privacy, in dire condition and nothing like the photos. They offered a “Super deluxe cabana” for an extra 30 USD for 3 nights. The first room wasn’t liveable, so we had no real choice but to pay for the upgrade. That room was moldy, with missing bathroom fittings and a cracked bathtub that was clogged. After we complained, they moved us to another room. There’s no wifi. Breakfast was poor, bland sphagetti every day, and the service was bad. They didn’t provide toiletries, even when we asked.

There were cockroaches in the toilets, but a repellant took care of them. The geckos in the rooms are harmless, though they made noise at night. Staff were friendly and the rooms were cleaned every day. It was an acceptable stay, especially since you spend little of your vacation in the hotel, but be prepared to deal with a few problems and inconveniences.

First they tried to put us in a room where the AC and refrigerator didn’t work. Then they showed us an even worse room in the building that smelled of spoiled fish. We had to pay extra to get a normal room. Later, they gave our phone number to the taxi company by mistake instead of the neighbors’ number. We hadn’t asked them to arrange a taxi and had already paid for a different transfer. Their driver arrived first, so we thought he was ours, and we ended up paying another $70 for their taxi transfer. They took no responsibility for their mistake 😔

Our room was in the area they called “the other side,” and it felt more like a storage space than hotel accommodation. I wouldn’t book here again. Breakfast was included, but we only tried it once because it wasn’t good. The building smelled terrible, maybe because of fish tanks or something else. There were lots of mosquitoes and cockroaches in the room, and the shared areas had things cluttered everywhere. From the balcony, all we could see were construction barracks. At 8 a.m. every morning, the cleaner knocked and woke us to ask if we wanted the room cleaned that day. The fridge froze everything, and the shower had almost no pressure and seemed nearly broken. The AC worked well, and the location was good, close to everything.