Andamanee Boutique Resort Aonang Krabi

This hotel is in a great location away from the hustles and bustle in the main strip. You do need transport (we hired a car) but apparently the hotel offers a taxi service. On first impressions the hotel does need a bit of tlc, for example there are areas that need repainting because they are looking a bit tired but this does not takeaway how lovely this hotel is. The decor in the reception and main building is of traditional Thai decor, lots of beautiful teak wood. The hotel has a big pool area with plenty of beds with umbrellas and although the pool bar wasn’t available, all we had to do was ask at the reception for a beer and the lovely staff member happily brought us them to where we laid by the pool. Our room was spacious and had a balcony, fridge and tv and a big bathroom with a great shower and a bath. And lastly all the staff we met were so nice and extremely helpful with any questions we had about the area.

I cannot recommend this poorly run hotel at all. It appears that the owner Su is desperately attempting to keep a failing hotel afloat, by doing all of the administrative tasks herself and not employing enough staff. This results in extremely poor customer service. Firstly we encountered a very slow laborious process to check in, where Su does it painstakingly, one guest at a time, including showing people to their rooms. Therefore we had to wait a long time for her to check us in one by one, & then her primary concern was just to extract £50 GBP from each guest, to be a deposit against any accidental breakages or lost items during your stay. There was no welcome drink to greet us, just this mercenary and unfriendly woman making sure she got everyone's deposits. She even insisted on taking it from my debit card using the uk currency, rather than giving me the choice of currency which the receipt stated should occur. Therefore I was charged a conversion fee, for a deposit - Unheard of !! Then when I finally got to my room I found that it hadn't been cleaned properly, with a broken curtain pole lying on the floor & the previous guest's rubbish in my bin! I made sure to report the broken curtain pole immediately, otherwise Su would no doubt have charged me for it when I left! But the truth is that breakages are happening naturally through wear and tear in an old hotel like this, which clearly hasn't been maintained properly over many years. There were signs of decay everywhere. The shower curtain pole was rusty & the cheap plastic curtain was dirty and smelly. The cupboards (the few that there were) stunk of mildew! The jacuzzi that is advertised to be situated in the pool, lies in a state of disrepair. So too the beach bar lies derelict, as they are too stingy to employ a bar man or maintenance staff to keep it up and running. Even though we arrived at 2pm (the advertised check-in time) it was 5.30pm before I was able to do anything to start to enjoy my holiday, because as well as not having cleaned my room properly, Su had neglected to check that the safety deposit box was working. Probably in her haste to search for chipped glasses or cups to charge the previous guests for! Unbelievably Su only had ancient old batteries at her reception desk and had to send a boy to the supermarket to get new ones & I therefore had to wait until 5:30pm for the safety deposit box to be operational. So in total my check in took 4 hours and it wasn't until 6pm that I could leave my room because they had asked me to wait for the lad to return to get the safe operational. Also as an avid tea drinker, imagine my disappointment to find neither tea nor coffee in the room. Su expressed surprise at this, saying there should have been coffee, but no tea. Yet further proof that my room had not been prepared before my arrival. When I asked why they only give coffee but no tea and attempted a little joke - "because us English love our tea" she sarcastically replied: "We don't have many English guests here fortunately". So she openly declared her dislike of English people! Sue attempts to do most of the jobs herself, so she doesn't have to employ staff. The only other staff observed were her sister and 1 or 2 young boys & girls to drive the shuttle bus, prepare the very meagre & over-priced breakfast and clean the rooms. Although the room cleaning consisted of a wipe over with a dirty towel , re-making the bed with the same sheets & refilling the water bottles with dubious water from a large bottle. The 2 water bottles they refill are reused for every guest & obviously never cleaned or replaced. Thus I could clearly observe black mould growing around the rims of both bottles & had to ask the cleaner to replace them after a few days. You will rarely find anyone at the reception to assist you, as Su is always busy elsewhere. You have to rely on one of the young boys to find her, otherwise none of the advertised services will happen. For example on my first morning I awaited the 9.30 shuttle bus outside the hotel from 9.15-9.45 but it didn't arrive. So I had to bang on the staff door next to Reception and a young lad came out and phoned Su, who was upstairs supervising breakfast. Only when she gave the order, was the young man able to take out the shuttle bus. This repeated itself on every occasion so that the shuttle truck regularly leaves 15 minutes late. Yet when they pick you up from the spot where they set you down on the very outskirts of Ao Nang, you must be early because they could arrive early and then you would be stranded miles from the hotel. There are only 6 outward shuttle buses and 5 returns, even though the room info pack states there are 8. The last return is 7.45pm so you have to leave Ao Nang centre early, or pay for an overpriced taxi. But be careful getting out of the hotel shuttle cart, because on one occasion the sister who was driving started to pull away at speed as I had my foot on the flimsy step trying to climb out. Thankfully the lady behind me grabbed my top and saved me from falling face first onto the hard concrete outside the hotel! After consistently leaving late on every occasion for 5 days, on the 6th day Su instructed the Shuttle truck driver to leave early and then she gleefully told me that I was late and had missed the Shuttle. She had even taken a video to show me, which proved that she knew I had requested it. I actually wasn't late, but their clock at reception is set 5 minutes early! She made her usual snide & caustic comments about me to the 2 new guests who were checking in, saying "This woman doesn't understand she has to follow our time while she is staying in our hotel" This woman is a really nasty piece of work and has absolutely no concept of customer service. This really unpleasant woman seems to have huge trust issues. She doesn't trust any of her staff to carry out even the most menial of tasks without her instructions, each and every time. This results in long waits for the guests for everything to be done, while she phones for another staff to come to help. In actual fact, if she managed the hotel properly there should be a shuttle bus with a driver ready at the advertised times. But this means Su would have to think of her guests first, which is something she doesn't like to do. Everything is done at her convenience and in her own (usually slow!) time. Her dislike/distrust of guests means that she treats all guests as potential thieves, with a long itinery at the front of the room info pack, listing the cost of each & every item in the case of theft or breakage, even down to the pillow cases and tissue box, wooden tray, tv remote etc. See attached photo. This leaves you feeling uneasy whether you will get your deposit back. And if you question that then Su will be really nasty and rude to you. I asked if we could get our £100 in deposits back the night before our departure, as we knew we would need to depart an hour before 7.30am when the Reception desk opens, because our flight was at 9.20 am. So I anticipated we would need to get our taxi by 6.30am when Su wouldn't be there. Su proceeded to tell me that we would only need 1 hour at the airport and when I said I'd prefer to get there in good time, she attempted to belittle me infront of other guests saying that I didn't seem to know about travelling ( I am widely travelled and this was my fourth trip to Thailand.) She also accused me of trust issues when I queried whether we would get our £100 deposit back if she wasn't at the desk when we left. Any reasonable person would have offered to refund them the night before, but not this mean person! She even went into a rant about how poor I must be to be bothered about such a meagre amount of money as £50 GBP. She got personal saying: "Is that a lot of money to you? because it's nothing to me!" Again her nasty tendency to attempt to belittle people and make herself feel superior! Several other guests told me they had fallen prey to her spiteful tongue as well. The lady in the room next door was told by Su that "There must be something wrong with your head!" and some Indian guests told me she had made nasty racist comments to them and appears to hate Indian people too. All in all, from the moment of arrival it was a very unpleasant experience staying at the Andamanee Boutique Resort. If I had known how bad it was and how unfriendly the manager (and only active staff member) was, then I would have avoided it like the plague! The hotel is grossly over-priced for a run-down hotel like this, in the midddle of nowhere, miles from Ao Nang. The final outrage was that I booked this hotel because it had a swimming pool which looked nice in the photos, but in fact I could not use it once and neither did hardly any other guests staying at the same time as us. The reason being that the pool was not being cleaned and was covered in a greasy film of filth, dead insects & leaves the whole week long. I had a room overlooking the pool and never observed it being cleaned once in the entire week and barely any guests dared to enter the filthiness of it. And as mentioned previously, the pool bar and the jacuzzi looked like they'd been out of action for years! As another reveiwer stated - " think Fawlty Towers"!! Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!