Residence La perle de l'atlas

We only lasted nine hours here before leaving. We arrived at the Perle de l’Atlas, which I’ll call the PDA, at 21-00, tired and unable to move on that late. I’m nearly 80, and we made up the very narrow bed, about 1.4m wide, then slept fitfully until 4-00am. At 4-15am I called our taxi driver Jamal and offered a very good fare to pick us up at 6-00am and take us to the Savoy Grand Hotel. We booked that through Booking.com too. Its rating was 8.7, lower than the PDA’s 9.4, yet it was very good. I can’t make sense of the ratings compared with what we actually experienced. The PDA’s arrival process felt very unprofessional and unpleasant, and the surroundings and apartment were so far from what we expected after reading the Booking.com reviews that we decided right away to leave for another hotel as soon as possible. I complained on arrival, then again when more problems came up, to keep a proper record. Booking.com’s customer support felt like a maze, and there didn’t seem to be a direct email address where I could send photos as evidence. Back in the UK, I looked through the PDA’s claimed 293 reviews. They weren’t in straightforward date order, but mostly grouped by language. The first large group was surprisingly long and written in good English despite coming from people from many countries. What stood out most was how consistently high the ’10’ ratings were. I compared them with many of the Savoy’s 9722 reviews, which felt quite different, punchier and more to the point, without the overly wordy praise of the hotel and Abdu the manager. The pictures give you a feeling of what a hovel it was!