I was going to start a JBR today but instead did hotel reports for Mics site which I have found to be an excellent aid in the past, here are the hotel reports.
Ramada Benoa
Stayed at Ramada Benoa from 05/11/05 for 5 nights. Beautiful hotel, with beautiful grounds, well laid out and the rooms are great, no bath but good hot water and pressure in the shower.
We had two rooms directly at the end of the pool on the ground floor, walked out of our rooms and there straight in front of us was the pool and Bale's for lounging in the shade. There is also an open-air games and library area. The prices in the Spa were reasonable.
Breakfast was really good, plenty of variety and everything was very fresh. The staff were great, eggs were cooked as you wanted them, cereals, pastries, fruit, toast and lots of cooked items, you need to ask for bacon as it is kept in the cooking area.
It was fairly quiet while we were there so pool lounges were not a problem, I could imagine that it could be a problem if the hotel was busy as it's a large hotel and the pool is not massive but it's really beautiful.
I think we had the best rooms as far as location is concerned, I enjoyed our ground floor terrace and the access it gave us to the pool, others may prefer the view from the upstairs rooms, they do have elevators.
Ramada Benoa also has 1 or 2 bedroom villas and from the outside they look lovely, I was given a really good quote for the villas, if you are interested you should negotiate with the hotel as they were willing to come down considerably in comparison with the rates advertised on their web site.
Ramada Benoa is at the far end of the road but it is still within easy walking distance of shops and restaurants. We would definitely stay there again, at the price that we were able to negotiate, it was extremely good value for money.
Kumala Pantai
Stayed at Kumala Pantai from 10th November 2005 for a week. I have seen reports about the pool being green, the pool was not green at all during our stay, I thought the pool was great, it's a huge pool, the pool chairs are a bit old but still serviceable, it was very, very, hot and humid this trip and that pool was great to fall into after a couple of hours out on the street and that's exactly what we did, fall into it.
Our rooms were good and well cleaned each day. We were given rooms on the third floor of "A" Block, I must admit the lack of an elevator was sometimes sorely missed especially after coming back with your arms full of shopping. A few times I felt like walking straight down the pathway from the lobby into the pool, out the other end along the path and then up those four flights of stairs. H said go on "do it", it was tempting.
Our rooms had built in entertainment, right outside was that huge tree that you walk under as you go down the pathway to the restaurant. During the day the tree was full of squirrels. They would do flying leaps off the roof above us and land in the tree and then commence eating in some of the most amazing positions you could imagine, they would chase each other around doing some more incredible leaps and then they would tire themselves out and flake out on a branch for an hour or so and then wake up and do it all again. At night the squirrels went to bed and the small fruit bats came out to entertain us. There were also lizards and some incredible butterflies to keep us amused. We also had a couple of incredible thunder & lightening storms at night, one which woke us up with a huge explosion of thunder that shook our beds.
The restaurant and room service were excellent, good food, good prices and good service, except at breakfast in the restaurant, we chose to eat outside and found that the staff did not like to walk outside with the tea & coffee pots but preferred to stay inside chatting with fellow staff members.
Overall, good hotel, excellent value for money, in a great location with some great restaurants just a short walk away. We would stay there again.
Our room numbers if you do or don't want wildlife right outside your room, A18 & A19
Stana Puri Gopa - Sanur
We stayed here from 17/11/05 for 9 nights, our daughter and granddaughter spent their last 1.5 nights here. We had already stayed at Ramada Benoa for a week and Kumala Pantai for a week and we wanted a small quiet hotel to have some time to ourselves after our daughter and granddaughter returned home to Australia.
I found Stana Puri Gopa on the web and the rooms looked good and they had a good deal on their website for staying multiple nights. (We were on a bit of a budget due to bringing family to Bali this time and this hotel seemed to fit the bill) I booked two deluxe rooms, one twin and one double. On arriving we asked to see the rooms and I think we were so taken with the ornately carved doors, the lovely balconies and the well made up beds complete with flowers that we didn't see anything else. I did notice that daughter's room had a full-length wall unit that enclosed the refrigerator and gave them a lot of storage space whereas ours had limited wardrobe/cupboard facilities and the refrigerator stood on the floor. We took the rooms we were shown.
Later as I was putting something in the refrigerator I noticed that the floor around it was covered in thick dust and that the walls and floor of our room had many dirty marks from prolonged use. After a long walk that afternoon we came back to the room to shower before going out to dinner, the bathroom had a large high sided bath with a shower over top and a separate shower on the opposite side of the room that was slightly sunken from the floor level, I jumped into this shower and found that there was no hot water, I could have handled this but H likes his hot showers and I knew he wouldn't be happy without warm water at the least.
H went off to reception to ask about the hot water, he returned just as I had finished my cold shower and told me that the only hot water is in the shower over the bath, I went to turn the taps on to check this and the rusty metal off the taps came away in my hand. H then told me that he had just been shown another room that we could have and clad only in a sarong and still dripping from the shower I was taken to have a look.
The room I was shown was exactly like the deluxe room on the web site and I questioned the young man from reception who was with us about the room we were given, if this was a deluxe room what was our room and he answered that it was also a deluxe room, hmmmm. This new room was exactly that an almost new room, some of the rooms in this area on the higher floors are still under construction. We took the new room and we were assisted to move all our unpacked possessions into the room by the young man from reception. If you decide to stay here make sure that you request a new room, there really is a big difference.
One strange thing about all the rooms that I saw here was that they had no soap holders in the shower, you had to reach around to the vanity to grab your soap, also no shower curtains or screens in the showers which I think will cause a cleaning problem in the new rooms after prolonged use as the water goes everywhere, most of it drains away but you can imagine that mould will build up over a period of time if not cleaned properly.
The pool area is not large but it is good, the pool chairs are a bit old but we never had a problem getting one. There were quite a few people coming and going at the hotel, it seems to be very popular with a lot of guests being repeat customers. The breakfast that we had included in our package rate from their website was a basic American Breakfast, eggs cooked anyway you wanted, a choice between juice or fresh fruit, toast, tea or coffee. We ate at the restaurant a couple of times for lunch, the food was okay and the prices were reasonable but they do add the 20% on top.
The hotel has a small Spa and the prices are very reasonable, the girls who run the spa are great and they give a 10% discount to hotel guests. Daughter and granddaughter had fingernails and toenails painted here before returning home and they created a work of art with beautiful raised frangipani on top of the nail polish. I have seen this done on the beach in the past but never to the standard that these girls did it.
The hotel is in a great location, the entrance to the hotel is awful and if you looked at it from the street you would probably turn away, don't, it is a lovely little hotel, there is a really nice grassed area with a few chairs and pool chairs where it is great to curl up with your favourite book. Once outside you can walk in either direction to shops and restaurants.
Overall we felt really comfortable here, great staff who did all they could to help us after we found out about the collapse of Air Paradise, free transport to the airport on very short notice when we were finally booked on a flight home and I was really was sad to be leaving Stana Puri Gopa as I had found our stay so peaceful and relaxing.
Oh and if you are tall like H beware of the chandelier type light fitting on the balconies, H hit his head every time he went to sit on the balcony, I positioned the table under the light so that he wouldn't but every time they cleaned the room they moved the table back against the wall, and yes he forgot every time and clanged his head again.
JBR to come
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