Prima Life Imperial Safa Hotel

5 readers found this review helpful

This is a very nice and clean hotel, the staff very pleasant, especially the animation team is working very hard. I give it a reasonably high rating because of extremely nice and clean rooms and nice staff.
All agencies claim that hairdryers are in every room, but that is just not true. We didn't have a hairdryer in the room, neither did one another couple that we asked, when I called the Reception to inquire about that the Receptionist said that he is very surprised at that (what a story teller!) and that he will get me a hairdryer "tomorrow for sure".
Well, this tomorrow never came, apparently they were all out of "reserve" hairdryers. Also, they don't really have beach towels. If you inquire about the beach towels at the Reception, if you are early enough (about 9:00 a.m.) they will give you something that looks like an old, should-be-thrown-out bath towel, this is what they obviously designate as beach towel.
I was embarrassed walking around with them, so we just took our bath towels from the room. Namely, no agency tells you that this four star hotel doesn't offer beach towels. Bottled water is for payment, the hotel has coolers with water that is for free. The fridge in the room is empty, you can't really keep anything in there anyway, because when you leave the room the electricity shuts off automatically. So you can't keep the a/c on either during the day when you are not in.
It was very difficult for us, coming to the hotel at 5:00 a.m. from Amsterdam, the flight was delayed and you are not allowed to take any drinks with you on board, which means that you were given a spit of water by the flight attendant, and then the one and a half hour drive to the hotel, to come to the hotel without even one complementary bottle of water in the room.
My four year old daughter was asking me for water, and we were actually all thirsty, so I went down to ask the Receptionist where to find water, he directs me to the Restaurant, I would have never guessed that the Restaurant is open since he never volunteered this information at check-in and the hallway was pitch black, the cooks were there and some food was prepared, which I thought was nice, I found the cooler with water, but guess what, couldn't really locate any glasses, only coffee cups, so what do they think I will do with a coffee cup? By the time I came back to the room with that coffee cup of water my daughter was asleep.
The lines for lunch and dinner are ludicrous, the dishes local and often was too spicy for my daughter, but on some of the days the food was tasty and sufficient. I gave up on a salad bar after a couple of days.
All this aside, after we adjusted our expectations and accepted where we are, the experience was very nice and we had nice holidays, mostly because the hotel is truly beautiful and the staff is really trying their best, you cannot at all blame them for all the problems of this hotel.
This hotel is in my opinion just very badly managed, but it could be great. Just buying sufficient amount of plates, cups and utensils, rearranging the food bar to avoid lines, employing a few more cooks so that the guests would not be left without food when coming to dinner and had to wait extra for the food to come and buying some proper beach towels and enough hair dryers would solve all the problems. Or even, that the agency would say that there are no beach towels.
We were there in September, I cannot imagine being in this hotel during peak season. I think that for the size of the hotel their pool and garden are too small, and they have too little beach chairs at the pool and on the beach.